[All Platforms] Explicit Filter

[sekuether21]

Add a button that controls whether Explicit songs are played or not.  When it is off and you're listening to an album or playlist, the explicit songs are skipped. That way you can still listen to your favorite album or playlist when more impressionable members of the family (kids / parents) are around.

[alephnaut]

I wonder what it is? They can't always come out and say if it's non-technical.

Cut my teeth on music production catalogues, they're a mess, so maybe it's the engineering effort? If it's as bad as it used to be (mostly unstructured text with built in incentives to keep it that way) just distinguishing explicit from non-explicit perfectly is not trivial. I imagine their product catalogue expands basically in real time so their engineering hurdles are probably way beyond what we had to deal with at cdnow.

They could release with an imperfect algorithm (say 95% accuracy) but maybe they're purists on the engineering side?

Could crowd source it - make voting for fixes a community building thing. Badges and all.

Or have a beta program and just leave it in beta.

Other possible issues: what happens when Spotify is streaming soccer parental unit's baby shower and accidentally plays the original version of Dr Dre's "B**CHES ain't s**t" instead of the muzak version?

Or maybe it's philosophical?

[Bmozisek]

They have responded. It is philosophical. They believe it is censorship.
They will not add this option. Go somewhere else. They care about the
artist and not you.

[Peterrevie]

No one is suggesting that they don't carry explicit song versions in the catalogue available for streaming and discovery by anyone who wants it - which would be censorship if they controlled availability of explicit songs. It is simply an end-user option to skip songs tagged that way - my choice, not theirs. 

[alephnaut]

It wouldn't cut into artist payments if they're paid for either stream. Are they licensed differently?

The artist gets 2 electronic deposits instead of 1. So what?

I'd want the biggest number next to both versions. Spotify could sell that as an add on - there's a real value add with the giant translation identifying 2 distinct items as a single concept...

[alephnaut]

Don't get me wrong, I'm very much pro artist. Spotify means better music. I like better music. I just don't see how a "my kids are listening" playlist button hurts the artist...

[Bmozisek]

When they are paid based on a proportion of their songs streamed to the all
the songs streamed they won't get as much money. Some artist have pulled
off Spotify because of this. They don't like it either. So to fix the
explicit button, need to be compaign to get the way artist are paid
differently

[alephnaut]

No way is this enough to send me off from Spotify. Not even close. Now playlist editing on mobile... Nope, not even that! 🙂

That's a question of fact though isn't it? Do they get fewer plays? Right now I basically don't use Spotify when I have my kid with me in the car. So no one is getting that Spotify revenue.

I bet Spotify could even figure out if there is a net artist gain or loss. I get my kid, like every other divorced dad, every other weekend. They can probably easily identify us by the absence. In the long run more Spotify usage means more data and, if they execute, more profit.

[alephnaut]

Wrt proportional loss, why not pay them a fractional royalty if their track is skipped? A lower royalty than for a play but still count it as a kind of play (the default totals include these skips as plays).

Another knob to turn is usually good for the intermediary. Turn it up high enough to make up for losses. But doing so may eat all the profit.

May have to wait for ai on-the-fly cleaning that's cheap.

[Peterrevie]

I don't buy that argument of less plays @Bmozisek - I would skip those songs manually anyway so they would not get any streaming credit from my account. I understand there are other services but I just signed up for a family account ... unless you are speaking directly on behalf of Spotify.

[alephnaut]

You know, this ai auto clean on the fly could be not as hard as it would have been before the big Software shops (Microsoft, Google, IBM) started falling over themselves to give away ai tools.

It's been a while since grad school but your training set is every song with a clean and explicit version. Most of the work was in massaging the input (how do you represent a song as a vector?) But Spotify has all the needed inputs to make this a weekend project for a suitably motivated programmer (*cough*cough* you could probably find a free lancer in this thread!)...

(TensorFlow and or whatever Google calls theirs)