Is there a clean music app?
What is a Clean Music App?
A clean music app is designed to provide edited versions of songs that remove profanity, explicit content, and other potentially objectionable material (according to Reddit). The purpose of a clean music app is to allow users to listen to popular music without hearing swear words, sexual references, or other adult content.
Clean versions substitute objectionable words and phrases with more radio-friendly lyrics. For example, a clean version may change “damn” to “darn” or omit words altogether. The edits smooth over explicit content to make songs cleaner and more appropriate for listeners who prefer not to hear profanity and references to drugs, sex, or violence.
Clean music apps cater to parents, families, religious groups, and other users who want access to mainstream music without the graphic or immoral language. They provide an alternative way to enjoy popular songs without the explicit original versions.
The Need for Clean Music
There are various reasons why some listeners desire clean versions of songs without profanity, obscenity, or explicit references. Many parents want to allow their children to enjoy popular music, but find the unedited versions inappropriate for kids. According to one Quora discussion, some parents believe clean versions allow kids to appreciate the music and lyrics, without exposure to mature content.
Clean versions may also be preferred by older listeners, religious audiences, or those who find explicit lyrics personally offensive. Additionally, clean edits are often required for broadcast radio, retail environments, gyms, and other public spaces. As noted in this NPR article, clean versions allow wider commercial use of popular songs.
In summary, clean edits serve the needs of parents, kids, sensitive listeners, and commercial venues seeking radio-friendly songs without mature content.
Major Music Streaming Services
The top music streaming services like Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music offer access to millions of songs, both clean and explicit. However, they take different approaches when it comes to organizing and filtering clean content.
Spotify has an “explicit” tag that identifies songs with swearing or mature themes. Users can filter their search results to only show clean songs without the tag. However, not every explicit song is properly tagged, so listeners may still encounter mature lyrics (source).
Apple Music does not have an official clean/explicit filtering system. Users must search for “clean versions” or individually edit song and artist settings. Apple relies more on a song’s metadata or user reports to restrict explicit content (source).
YouTube Music allows toggling “Restricted Mode” to limit profane and mature music results. This is an imperfect solution, often excluding harmless songs and missing explicit ones. Manual control is required for a truly clean experience (source).
Amazon Music has a limited number of “clean” playlists and stations. Users cannot broadly filter for clean versions of songs. Explicit tagging relies on manual curation by Amazon’s music editors (source).
In summary, while major streaming services are taking steps to improve organization of clean content, gaps still exist in filtering, tagging, and restrictions. None offer a seamless way to avoid all mature music.
Standalone Clean Music Apps
While most major streaming services now offer some parental control options, there are also dedicated apps created specifically for clean music listening. These apps aim to filter out explicit lyrics, keeping the musical content family-friendly. Some of the top options include:
ClearTune – This app lets you upload your own music library and uses AI to detect and mute explicit words in songs. It creates “clean” versions of tracks on the fly. You can toggle between clean and original versions.
CleanMusicAI – Similar to ClearTune, this app applies real-time audio filtering to detect profanity. It claims over 99% accuracy in removing swear words. The free version has ads.
Saavn Parental Control – Music streaming service Saavn offers a parental control mode that blocks explicit songs. It detects explicit lyrics in multiple languages.
Slacker Radio – This internet radio app lets you block specific songs and filter out explicit content. It has over 100 expert-curated stations.
These apps provide dedicated clean music solutions, giving you precision control over what your kids can access. Their filtering algorithms continuously improve at identifying inappropriate content.
How Clean Music Apps Work
Clean music apps use advanced audio processing technology to detect and filter out explicit lyrics in songs. According to Protect Young Eyes, most clean music apps scan a song’s lyrics and audio to identify profanity, sexual references, violence, and other inappropriate content.
When explicit words or phrases are detected, the app will mute or skip over them entirely so they are not heard. The music continues playing but is essentially edited in real-time to remove unsuitable content. This automated editing process allows clean versions of songs to be generated without needing separate recordings.
Some apps like CleanMusicAI rely on advanced AI and machine learning to continually improve their detection abilities. Over time, the accuracy and scope of filtered content increases. However, no filtering technology is 100% foolproof. Subtleties like sarcasm and slang can be challenging for algorithms to recognize appropriately.
Most clean music apps allow some customization of filtering levels. Parents can choose whether they want all profanity blocked or just the most extreme words, for example. But overall the editing algorithms make the judgment calls on what content to remove.
Limitations of Clean Music Apps
Clean music apps often have limitations in accurately identifying explicit content due to the difficulty of analyzing lyrics and sounds. As noted on Reddit, “Apple Music’s filter seems to miss a lot of explicit songs” (source). The apps rely on databases of tagged songs, which can be incomplete and prone to errors. Some explicit words or themes may slip through if not properly tagged.
Clean versions of songs also lose artistic context, as censoring words or sounds damages the original creative intent. As Apple Support comments, “editing songs could remove lyrics that provide context for other lyrics or important information about the song” (source). Licensing restrictions may prevent clean music apps from providing edited versions of some popular songs.
Overall, while clean music apps can filter out obvious profanity, limitations remain in accurately identifying more subtle explicit content. The technology struggle to balance usability with preserving artistic integrity. Parents should still monitor their children’s listening and have open discussions about song themes.
Parental Control Options
The major music streaming services like Apple Music, Spotify, YouTube Music, and Amazon Music all offer some kind of parental control options to restrict explicit content. For example, Apple Music allows you to enable “Restrict Explicit Content” under parental controls, which will block songs marked as explicit (Source). Similarly, on Spotify you can enable “Explicit Content Filter” under account settings to block explicit songs.
There are also device-level parental controls you can set up. On iPhones and iPads, you can use Screen Time to block access to explicit music and require a passcode to change settings. This gives parents more control over what their kids can listen to (Source). For Android devices, apps like Google Family Link provide parental controls for Google services, including YouTube Music.
The advantage of service-level and device-level controls is that they restrict access universally across the platform. However, they rely on the streaming service properly tagging songs as “explicit” and may not catch everything. Dedicated clean music apps offer more customized control.
Making Your Own Edited Music
If you want more control over the editing process, you can create your own clean versions of songs using audio editing software. This gives you the flexibility to remove or edit specific words or sections according to your preferences.
One popular free audio editing tool is Audacity. With Audacity, you can import a song file, select portions you want to edit out, and cut or mute them. You’ll need to listen through the song carefully to find all instances of inappropriate content. Some helpful editing features in Audacity include:
- The Silence Audio tool to mute sections
- Cutting out sections of the audio waveform
- Reducing volume rather than fully muting
- Inserting beeps or other sounds over words
Paid tools like Ocenaudio offer more advanced audio editing capabilities. However, Audacity has all the basics covered for making simple clean edits.
The advantage of DIY editing is you can polish songs to your own standards. The downside is it takes more effort and you need an audio editor installed. Overall, editing your own music library gives you the most control over the listening experience.
Future Possibilities
Advances in AI and machine learning could greatly benefit clean music apps in the future. Rather than simply detecting explicit words, AI algorithms could analyze lyrical meaning and context to filter out more subtle inappropriate content. AI tools like AIVA and MuseNet, originally designed to generate music, could potentially be repurposed to intelligently edit existing songs by removing profanity while retaining musicality. AI production tools like Orb Producer Suite already allow editing of pitch, tempo, and instruments – this technology could be specialized to edit lyrics. More advanced AI may even generate “clean versions” of songs tailored to each individual user’s content preferences. With continued innovation, AI and machine learning have exciting potential to make clean music apps faster, more customizable, and effective at identifying inappropriate content.
Do Clean Music Apps Deliver?
While there are some options for clean versions of songs through certain music streaming apps, the current offerings do not fully meet the needs of many users looking for edited content. The selection of edited songs is still very limited on most services. For example, Spotify only offers clean versions of a small portion of their catalog, so users are unlikely to find edited versions of all the songs they want to listen to (source).
Some users on Reddit have complained that major streaming services like Deezer and Spotify need to improve their libraries of edited songs if they want to fully serve families and younger audiences ( source). While third-party clean music apps help fill the gap, they rely on manual editing which is time-consuming and cannot match the scale of major streaming catalogs. There is still clear demand for more extensive availability of pre-edited, clean versions of songs through official channels.
In summary, current clean music offerings provide a helpful option but have room for improvement in terms of breadth of edited song catalogs. Major services may find opportunities by expanding their libraries of clean content to better serve families and those looking to avoid explicit lyrics.