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?
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
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?
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…
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.
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.
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:
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.
The problem I am finding is that explicit versions I have added to my playlist are replaced with clean versions. Not always, but sometimes.
unless something has changed fundamentally, im not sure how this is possible to change your playlist like that. like i posted last night, i noticed it on the song Teenage Dirtbag, it was edited, i never really spent time to fix it as i always heard it driving and forgot to fix it. it’s possible artists are just posting edited/unedited versions and spotify is defaulting to edited.
this was the version i had saved as it came up first - https://open.spotify.com/track/3LI4MmibTkXH5cGpCGZgyw - and you can see it’s from dawson’s creek, obviously edited.
updated it to this one - https://open.spotify.com/track/25FTMokYEbEWHEdss5JLZS - and it’s the unedited version right from their album.
if you look here, Xzibit has 2 versions of his album Weapons of Mass Destruction, one clean, one edited and clearly labeled - https://open.spotify.com/artist/4tujQJicOnuZRLiBFdp3Ou/discography/album
It seems that the way that YTM maintains playlist is by keeping a track list and populating it on the fly with the first hit it gets. If the metadata doesn’t include a special mention of “explicit” or “clean”, you end up with a crapshoot on which version you’ll get.
For me it even went beyond that. I had uploaded my personal collection to Play Music. When they migrated to YouTube Music they replaced my tracks with tracks from their catalog, including edited versions.
my play library got fucked up too, had to manually fix, took a long time.
deleted by creator
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.
Don’t fat-shame the acids!
Delicious
“if you think fatty is a bad word you might be a fatty”
Retardation is also something to do with maths.
Yeah, my retardation kept me from passing it
😂 Lmao same
And ignition timing for engines.
Your Lemmy instance is censoring it
Does lemm.ee really censor words? I couldn’t find anything on their website about that
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!
…jeez, the irony
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.
Good spotting! Maybe Spotify execs have beef with people selling fake crack?
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)
I have a 2000s playlist on YouTube. The censoring throws me off and interrupts my vibe every time.
I chimed in with a, “haven’t you people ever heard of closing the [conspicuous empty beat] damned door?!”
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.
It’s always advertisers getting frisky.
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.
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’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.
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.
It’s all about that ad dollar.
It always was
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.
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?
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.
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.
Haven’t noticed this on Spotify
I did with teenage dirtbag. album version good, some weird collection album was edited to shit.
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?He’s a Gick, and that’s the last I want to hear about it.
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
