Digging the Dirt on iTunes Store "Clean"
Category: Music...
Posted Thursday, December 21, 2006 at 02:22 PM [GMT-6]

In response to a number of comments left on yesterday's post about the odd labeling in the iTunes Store of several songs by Christian rock band Audio Adrenaline, I did a little more exploration of the Store and learned enough to formulate a plausible explanation.

According to the iTS's page about Music Ratings (this link will work only if you have iTunes installed), the "Clean Lyrics" label (represented on iTS as an icon labeled simply "Clean," as seen on yesterday's post) is used "to differentiate the edited version of an album or song whose content has been modified from its original form so that it does not require the Parental Advisory Label." This is in keeping with the RIAA's guidelines on parental advisories.

In and of itself, this explanation still doesn't clarify the labeling of a handful of Audio Adrenaline's songs as "clean," but I looked closer at the song listing and discovered that all of the songs so labeled were taken from various albums and combined into a five song compilation entitled Top 5 Hits: Audio Adrenaline (EP). Thus, a mindless application of the RIAA guidelines apparently requires the labeling of these songs since they were modified from their original release, if only by virtue of their being put in a different lineup than the albums from whence they came.

This also explains why one listing of the song is labeled "Clean" while the original version is unlabeled.

None of this seems logical or helpful, but I can't think of a better explanation.

Of potentially more interest is this paragraph lifted from the above-linked page on the RIAA website (emphasis added):

One might wonder if Apple is violating the spirit, if not the letter, of the RIAA guidelines by labeling this music in this manner, as I can't imagine that the band or the record label would ask for such a label. It would be interesting to know if Audio Adrenaline is aware that some of its music is being labeled "Clean," and how the band might feel about the implication that its non-labeled music is explicit.