Issue
While listening to music, especially when listening to through Autoplay after an album, through Discover, Daily Mixes or automatically generated playlists, Spotify often plays the "clean" edits of songs that have their original version tagged as explicit.
The option "Allow playback of explicit-rated content" is there for people who don't want explicit content, but the behavior of this option is not ideal for people who have it enabled.
If an explicit version of a song exists, I do not want to hear the censored, chopped up version with often mangled lyrics. I want to hear the original song as the artist intended it. In my opinion the clean version is nearly always inferior to the original.
Currently it seems like the use-case of people who want to hide explicit music is valued higher than the use-case for people who want to listen to the original. I would argue that we should be treated at least equally.
Example
What got me here today was while listening to "Ten thousand hours" by Macklemore & Ryan Lewis, and hearing "Make sure the soundman doesn't block-block the drums" and hearing frequent "Shht"'s really breaks the flow of the track.
What especially triggered me, is that it showed that I had "hearted"/liked the song. I did like the original version, and it occurs in multiple playlists of mine. The clean version does not.
Note that this is not a complaint about this song in particular, it is just an example that occurred today.
Proposed solution
If the "Allow playback of explicit-rated content" option is ticked, the "clean" content is very likely of no value to the user, and should never be favored over the original version.
If you do not want to force this behavior to the entire userbase, or change existing behavior for existing users, then an option could be to add an extra opt-in setting to "Block playback of clean edits when original is available" or something similar. So basically the exact opposite of the currently already implemented "Allow playback of explicit-rated content" is desired: never allow clean edits.
Your team might well come up with a different, perhaps better solution, but the end goal would be to never have to listen to a "clean" version again when the original is available.
Previous submissions and discussions
Many ideas have been submitted before, they are however all closed, marked as duplicate, marked as "unclear" or found to have not enough votes.
This new submission is an attempt to combine all previous efforts and hopefully get some traction.
While not all of the options discussed below are exactly the same, they are all about this topic and they all suggest some way of playing the original over the clean edit.
If you see all the previous topics in the table below (there are probably others that I might have missed), it is clear that this is a frequently brought up topic in the community.
Hopefully listing them here helps people find this feature request.
And while they are not 100% related, these topics might not have been raised if this problem was solved, they seem to have found clean options of a specific song, while they explicitly wanted the original version.
And these older ideas were referenced from some other ideas/questions, but I get Access Denied:
Updated on 2025-03-03
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