Am I going fucking crazy? (Regarding explicit songs being censored on various music streaming services.)
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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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…
Let's refer to it as 2010, birth of Sir Citizens United, because if the large corporations want something to happen, or to not happen, they're likely to get their way after after a year or two.
some exceptions occur, because they always do
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
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.
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.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_action_problem
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.
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.