Why UMix Built a Feature to Stop Playing Clean Versions of Songs
UMix Subscribers can now stop clean versions of songs from playing in their locations.
Sounds counter-intuitive for a Business Music Service? Stay with us. This isn’t going where you might think it is.
A few words about song lyrics
Many of today’s songs exist in two general “versions.” There’s the explicit version, which contains explicit lyrics. And there’s the non-explicit version, which uses different techniques to suppress those lyrics. You’ll see them labeled Clean Version, Radio Edit, or Radio Only Edit. They’re just different names doing the same work on the lyrics.
This is heavily concentrated in modern rap, hip-hop, and pop. So if a retailer’s business music mix includes those genres, non-explicit versions can turn up in their locations.
For decades, that non-explicit version has been the background music industry’s answer for a business that doesn’t want explicit lyrics playing in its stores. Play the clean one.
But the problem is that it doesn’t work as well as everyone assumed.
The word may be out of the audio, but the mental space it occupied isn’t. And so any listener who knows the song fills the word back into that space. Psychologists actually have a name for this. Look up phonemic restoration if you’re curious.
Some people don’t care at all. Others might care deeply.
Which leaves the store manager in a bad spot. The truth is the customer heard a clean version of the song with the explicit lyrics removed. But the truth doesn’t remove the retailer’s real problem, which is that it prompted a customer to complain.
A recent episode prompted a new idea
A UMix Subscriber with 170 locations came to us with a claim: a song with bad lyrics played in their stores.
We checked the exact song to confirm. The song that played was a “clean version.” That was no surprise to us because we pre-screen all songs for explicit lyrics. So we reported back to them and began thinking more about it. UMix being “right” didn’t help them. Their customer had still complained. So we came up with an idea, ran it by them, and then built it.
That was five months ago. And the good news is that they’ve had zero complaints since.
How does it work?
With literally one checkbox, UMix Subscribers can eliminate the songs that have these different versions. They simply don’t play at all, so there’s nothing to fill the blank back in from.
Worth emphasizing: this is a second layer, not the first. The music was already clean before this setting existed. What this handles is the narrower problem — songs with no profanity in them at all, that a listener fills in on their own.
What made UMix build something like this?
The old guard of business music was built on a premise: the service knows better what retailers should play. The retailer bought a program, someone else picked the music, and if they wanted something different they called a rep and waited.
We’ve never believed that really worked for the retailer. It only worked for the Business Music Service. Our premise is that Subscribers know their businesses better than anyone — their customers and their brands. Our job isn’t to apply our opinions onto our Subscribers. Our job is to hand them the best tools we can build and then get out of their way.
So we didn’t decide that clean versions are bad. Plenty of operators have no issue with them, and for their business they’re right.
We decided to build the switch. This way, the UMix Subscriber once again makes their own best choice for their own business.