The existence of a clean version can increase some albums’ sales as much as 30 percent, according to Ghazi.Īnd the artistry of clean edits has made huge progress since the Swiss cheese days. But Ghazi, who uses only one name, also pointed to outlets like JPay, which provides music - clean only - to prison inmates, as well as to online platforms in Asia and the Middle East that block explicit content. He noted all the standard opportunities that would disappear without a clean song, like licensing for television and being piped into restaurants and retail shops. “It’s a lost part of the business,” he said. Ghazi, the founder of Empire, an independent distribution company that specializes in hip-hop, thinks that much of the industry fails to grasp the importance of clean versions. If no edited version is available, radio stations - or random YouTube users - may simply make their own. Those albums may not get a clean version until days or weeks after their initial release, or never. Though once seen as a bold and risky stance - Green Day, for example, refused to edit its albums “American Idiot” (2004) and “21st Century Breakdown” (2009), and forfeited sales at Walmart - that rarely draws wide notice today.Īnother reason was structural: In the streaming age, music can be made and released so quickly that little time is left for edits. Some musicians, they said, object on principle to the censoring of their work. Record executives and artist managers offered various explanations for the inconsistency, although many were not willing to speak on the record. The success of “WAP” highlighted one of the music industry’s dirty little secrets: that even in an age of rampant vulgarity - and 35 long years since a crackdown on lyrics by the Washington elite - the bowdlerizing of pop songs remains deeply ingrained in the work of artists and their marketers. If fans listened only to that version, they wouldn’t have learned what its title acronym stood for - instead, just that something was “wet and gushy.” Wynter recalled that the ostensibly sanitized copy first offered by Cardi B’s label, Atlantic - the “clean” version of the song, in industry jargon - was still too racy for broadcast, leading Wynter to ask for nine additional, last-minute edits.Īnd the music video for “WAP” that caught fire on YouTube was elaborately censored. Before “WAP” could be played on the radio, its most explicit verbiage was pruned by Cardi B’s engineers. Yet despite the song’s uninhibited raunch, its popularity was partly earned from one of the music industry’s oldest bugaboos: self-censorship.

Explicit music tag