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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?
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)
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
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.
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”…
Tf
white fragility
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.
There is zero chance any white person has ever complained about that song
Dunno man, my people are pretty good at complaining.
We don’t complain about getting compliments!
And can you see such an organization playing that song instead of…not playing that song?
I predict we won’t be able to properly express how someone looks in 5 years, because all words will be offensive.
White/Black/Asian. Fat. Bald. Skinny. Women/Man. Probably all offensive soon.
Oh come on. Extremists gonna extreme. Some will try to make a bunch of words offensive, the others will keep fighting for their right to use these words. The vast majority of the rest of people will just keep living their lives and just use whatever’s the most appropriate word at a given time with the language evolving. It used not to be considered really offensive to insult people with gay slurs when I was in high school. Languages evolve with their times, and that’s perfectly fine.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
same with streaming services censoring older shows. it’s cable all over again
I wouldn’t be surprised if it’s related to many streaming services adding ads even for subscribers. Advertisers are notorious for driving censorship.
But I don’t understand - it’s inconsistent. Some stuff will be censored and others won’t be?
They apply it piecemeal and charge more for guaranteeing that your ad won’t be put in an un-censored show if that’s a thing that matters to you. Or that it will be put in an un-censored show. Or either. Or both. Or different things for different catalogs that they specify.
They’re selling targeting. They’re just creating another axis to segregate data on that can be charged for in their pricing model.
Not just you. It fucking sucks. Patti Smiths Song “Rock n Roll removed” is gone from Spotify too, for example.
Why did you write removed rather than whatever word it actually was?
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.
I got banned on Facebook for saying “fatty acids” because “fatty” is a bad word.
Your Lemmy instance is censoring it
I didn’t know programming.dev censored words, that’s disappointing
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
I see, that makes sense. Thanks for the answer!
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).
Limp Bizkit - Hot Dog
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.
One more reason to maintain your own media library instead of relying on streaming services. Every single service can at any point and without notifying the user delete and alter content as well as remove features.
