Your Questions: Where Can I Get Clean Versions Of Songs?

Reader Fernando writes: “I DJ in my school, and because of that, I want to know where I can get the ‘clean’ versions of the music the students want. The thing is, a lot of the music I’m asked for is rap, and I definitely need to be able to cut out the profanity in order to be able to play these tunes. Can you tell me where I might obtain such versions please?”

Digital DJ Tips says:

Firstly, look for “radio edit” versions, as they tend to be clean and aren’t so hard to find on most music download stores. Alternatively, you could look to joining a record pool – someone like DJcity has lots of versions and often these services carry clean versions exactly for DJs such as yourself. It is worth remembering that some DJ controllers and software have a “censor” button. This plays the tune backwards when pressed, taking off where it would have been when released. Basically, it lets you “beep” out swearing. While you might not want to rely on your remembering to do it every time, at least you could re-records the tunes with swearing thus removed, and then delete the explicit version, playing the “cleaned up” version from then on.

Finally, if you’re an iTunes Match user, you may just find that iTunes has switched explicit for clean versions automatically for you – definitely an undesired teething issue with the cloud music service!

Do you need to obtain and play non-explicit versions of music in your DJing? Where do you get them from? Any advice to add for Fernando? Please share your tips in the comments.