Am I going fucking crazy? (Regarding explicit songs being censored on various music streaming services.)

submitted by Risk edited

I swear to god, more and more I keep having 'clean' versions play on Spotify, YouTube Music, Deezer - despite the song being marked as 'Explicit'.

And no, I definitely do not have the setting checked for only playing clean versions.

It's not just me - is it?

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68 Comments

sir_pronoun

Not just you. It fucking sucks. Patti Smiths Song "Rock n Roll *removed*" is gone from Spotify too, for example.

JackGreenEarth

Why did you write removed rather than whatever word it actually was?

SchmidtGenetics , edited

Some apps or instances auto censor some words, like the N word in the song there, or retard is another, it’s other use is using a retarder to slow a chemical reaction.

Evil_incarnate

I got banned on Facebook for saying "fatty acids" because "fatty" is a bad word.

snooggums

This sounds so stupid that I believe it could be true.

LostXOR

Don't fat-shame the acids!

ThrowawayPermanente

Delicious

JackGreenEarth

Retardation is also something to do with maths.

OldManBOMBIN

Yeah, my retardation kept me from passing it

Twitches

😂 Lmao same

brygphilomena

And ignition timing for engines.

Supermariofan67

Your Lemmy instance is censoring it

JackGreenEarth

Does lemm.ee really censor words? I couldn't find anything on their website about that

gentooer

I didn't know programming.dev censored words, that's disappointing

Ategon , edited

Admin here, there should be nothing censored atm apart from a couple scam links

Not sure why that says removed but its not on our end (and its like that everywhere). Lemmy probably has some handling where it also censors if the posters instance says so

gentooer

I see, that makes sense. Thanks for the answer!

sir_pronoun

..jeez, the irony

uncreativechap

That's weird that the original is gone, the Marilyn Manson cover of it is still on there. In a more egregious example, the Anal Cunt song "Beating Up N*s That Sell Fake Crack" is still up too.

sir_pronoun

Good spotting! Maybe Spotify execs have beef with people selling fake crack?

laurelraven

Not just you... I've had both clean and explicit versions playing of the same songs coming up randomly and it's annoying.

I legit want an option to only use the explicit versions, the clean ones never sound good where they clean it up, and sometimes they even use those stupid sound effects that just frankly destroy the song. If the service only has the clean version, I think I'd rather it just not play it at all

WIZARD POPE💫

I honestly never even knew the cleaned up versions existed before we went on a trip to america and that s all that played on the radio.

captainnapalm83

Not sure if it's just you, but we were at an event last night and the DJ was playing "Play that funky music" by Wild Cherry and it was censored during the chorus to remove "white boy" and "whitey"...

weariedfae

Tf

ℕ𝕖𝕞𝕠

white fragility

snooggums

There is zero chance any white person has ever complained about that song, but I can see some kind of overzealous cenoring busybody treating anything that could possibly be misconstrued as racist censoring it.

It could also be AI automated filtering.

vzq

There is zero chance any white person has ever complained about that song

Dunno man, my people are pretty good at complaining.

snooggums

We don't complain about getting compliments!

RampantParanoia2365

And can you see such an organization playing that song instead of...not playing that song?

🇰 🔵 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 ℹ️ , edited

I noticed this last night! Listening to something with a lot of "fucks" in the chorus, the lyrics page still had them in there and the song itself had the explicit marker but every instance of "fuck" was blanked over. It wasn't censored the last time I heard the song on the service and it's the only version I have liked (which is what playlist I was listening to it from).

Rai

Limp Bizkit - Hot Dog

Risk [OP]

Oh my God, thank you for the confirmation.

terwn43lp

same with streaming services censoring older shows. it's cable all over again

AgentGrimstone

I have a 2000s playlist on YouTube. The censoring throws me off and interrupts my vibe every time.

vithigar

*I chimed in with a, "haven't you people ever heard of closing the [conspicuous empty beat] damned door?!"*

uncreativechap

I've only noticed this with one song in my Spotify library, Johnny Cash's "A Boy Named Sue". I saved it years ago and near the end is a line "I'm the son of a bitch that named you Sue". Out of nowhere about a year ago the album version changed to be "I'm the [bleep] that named you Sue". It still shows the full lyrics, it's just the audio that's changed and it drives me up the wall.

bluewing

That happens to a lot of songs with a a snippet of "socially" frowned upon lyrics. From a "Boy Named Sue to "My Dingaling" to When You Get a Hair Cut" to "Money for Nothin'". Recording artists often have recorded 2 different versions of some songs - one for people to buy and one that can be played on the radio due to "decency laws" set by the FCC and local ordinances.

It's been that way since the 1930s in the US.

uncreativechap

I'm familiar with the way censored versions of songs work, I'm more miffed that the version I had saved was the explicit version until it randomly got changed to the censored version.

Jo Miran

Enshittification intensifies. I feel like I am traveling back in time. Recently I started ripping music again because of streaming service enshittification, and just two weeks ago I started burning CDs again because an update was pushed to my phone that broke compatibility with my car's Bluetooth. Last time it took two months for them to hotfix it.

Fredselfish

No YouTube is now censoring things that they find profane. I was watching one of my favorite channels and host was discussing the HBO Doc on Nickelodeon and she wasn't being vulger but everytime she said the words sexaul assault they would cut it. Pissed me off. I am fucking adult and don't want YouTube deciding what words I am allowed to hear.

Shit getting worse like fucking 1984 when exactly are we going rise up and demand better?

folkrav

1984 supposes it’s coming from big government and social structures. Seems like a lot of people just aren’t watching what big corporations are doing cause it’s getting at least just as creepy…

kora

Exactly the moment when a person(s) of strong character evident primarily through the way they conduct themselves. No amount of documentation of previous good character can hold up against someone who doesn't care about it on the first place.

They need be only 2 things: Humble, and undeniably good character. When someone meets them, the only people who won't think they're worth following will be people who don't have good intents, and even they will internally admit and know who they've met.

I think the imaginary power couple of Keanu Reeves and Julie D'Aubigny

mPony

when exactly are we going rise up and demand better

That would be when consumers decide to come together and operate collectively in their own best interests against immense multinational corporations.
Soooooooooo, possibly quite a while.

pokemaster787

To be fair, in that specific case it is almost certainly not YouTube *directly* censoring the phrase. They aren't known to do any kind of editing like that on uploaded videos.

What *is* happening is the person that uploaded that video censored themselves....because YouTube's policy around monetization. They'll demonetize videos with certain no-no words. Part of that is YouTube and part of that is advertisers demanding their ads not be placed on content that they find objectionable.

*Indirectly*, YouTube and advertisers are censoring our content. A lot of it is also TikTok, which *will* ban you for no-no words. This seeps over into YouTube where something that *might* be fine on YouTube but is banned on TikTok gets censored anyway in case it gets clipped for TikTok.

Genuinely the power TikTok and it's advertisers have over how we communicate is pretty scary. Imagine how often you hear "unalive" instead of "suicide" these days. "Pdf" (or others) instead of "pedophile." The list goes on.

Fredselfish

Never hearsd any of those words that pretty crazy. And didn't think about if she was self censoring. But you know I think advertiser need fuck off. Its fucking 2024 and should be able to say fuck mainstream.

TK420 , edited

A few years ago I was in a car with coworkers and the music was weird…..turns out Amazon was playing all covers. Driver said it was a regular Amazon stream. I was never more happy to have my Plex server and have been increasing my CD purchases from eBay.

PSA: don’t forget to wash your “new to you” CDs, they rip much better. Just need a little hand soap and water and boom, clean ass discs ready to go.

Jo Miran , edited

PSA: don’t forget to wash your “new to you” CDs, they rip much better. Just need a little hand soap and water and boom, clean ass discs ready to go.

Gen-X here:

thermal_shock

different albums release different versions of songs. found this with Teenage Dirtbag. legit album version was fine. spotify isn't censoring on the fly. lots of albums, like from xibit or busta rhymes released clean and explicit versions of the album. depends on artist and label.

aes

I worked on exactly this for a while, a long, long time ago. It turns out to be an annoyingly difficult bag of problems. The record companies don't really care, they sell (sold, I guess) pieces of plastic. (Idk if they fixed it yet, but the same Turbonegro album kept getting sent with the same scratches, kept getting taken down a while later, for *years*.) So, good luck trusting them to label anything.

Puritans are so much more aggressive than sane people that making mistakes one way is much more expensive than the other way.

Anyway, we ended up trying to work out which tracks are actually the same song, (Easy for you, harder for friend computer, yes?) and then if one of them is marked explicit, they all are, unless marked "radio edit" or "clean", or whatever. If you think about this for a minute, if one track is labeled "radio edit", maybe the other ones should be marked explicit...

It's a deep rabbit hole, is what I'm saying.

And the people with the pitchforks are never happy.

Risk [OP]

I get that it's not necessarily simple, however... Firstly, surely streaming companies could push for a standard formatting to make their lives easier. And second, why does a track that was previously explicit suddenly start playing as the clean version one day? Why is the data for it continually being changed?

aes

Could 'push', yes, as in, "we mentioned it in passing when rock and roll grandpa wasn't paying attention, so he wouldn't throw a hissy fit and withdraw from the service". Oh, you meant to the labels? Ha ha ha, *NO*. The labels have basically nuclear option veto powers.

As for changes, well, updates get delivered all the time, for various reasons. (The scratched Turbonegro album being one frequent flyer.) I think a lot of those are bullshit SEO-like reasons, but it is what it is.

Which artist appears in most frequent releases? I forget, but I think it's Elvis. Possibly Johnny Cash. Why? Because some material has gone out of copyright in some jurisdictions, and so people have the idea to upload them again in 'new' compilations. (The content team don't even beat these down personally -- that's machine work)

ditty

I've noticed this using Spotify. If I manually play an explicit song - either directly or in an album or playlist - I get the uncensored version. If I ask Google Assistant to play the song, I get the censored version.

shani66 , edited

While i dont listen to music popular enough to be affected, the world is absolutely slipping back into prude bullshit. I think we let our guard down because the new prudes don't sound like the old ones, instead of using Christianity they use liberalism (as in, tokenizing identities and treating a negative peace as the highest goal possible). It's the exact same minds raised under a different set of morals.

Ginger666

What im pissed about is that they used the censored version when they remastered this:

https://www.discogs.com/release/10057933-The-Doors-The-Doors

How much more censorship like this will happen in the future?

MrJameGumb

It haven't been an issue on Prime Music yet. At least not that I've noticed.

HerrVorragend

I must say, I did not notice this lately.

If this really is the case it would mean a big step back. 30 years or so ago, censoring was mainly due to prudish broadcasting networks.

Nowadays it probably will be to not offend the easily offended crowd. Let's hope it won't catch on.

PunnyName

It's all about that ad dollar.

Jarix

It always was

kcuf

I wonder if it's cheaper to just store and vend the censored version from a CDN? Though maybe they could just do the censor step in the app, idk

This is fine🔥🐶☕🔥

Haven't noticed this on Spotify

thermal_shock

I did with teenage dirtbag. album version good, some weird collection album was edited to shit.

mPony

yeah I can understand the motivation for removing "gun"
but "her boyfriend's a dick" is a perfectly valid lyric. How in the fuck-flavoured fuck is "*dick*" so offensive to people?

feedum_sneedson

He's a Gick, and that's the last I want to hear about it.

undergroundoverground

The worst example is the clean version of Ace hood's bugatti, you got on an near game trial. Nearly every other word was absent. It was ridiculous.

Mossy Feathers (They/Them)

I haven't noticed this on Qobuz, but Qobuz doesn't have ads either.

bigbadmoose

Same here. One of the reasons I switched, not to mention how awful Spotify sounds

jjjalljs

I mostly listen to music on Bandcamp, where so far as I know nothing has been censored. Except maybe la femme's last album cover.

I prefer buying music over renting it, but I understand it's not for everyone.

LittleTarsier

Haven't had this problem on Tidal!