iTunes Match replacing explicit songs with clean versions

iTunes Match seems like a fantastic idea. Pay $25 a year, get all of your tracks up in the cloud either by having them recognized or by uploading them, and then you are free to download them to your iPhone at a moments notice. It seems the service isn’t exactly perfect with a frustrating glitch being discovered that converts explicit versions of songs to clean versions.

The issues with iTunes Match was recently reported by Cult of Mac. Apparently Buster Heine wanted to listen to some of his rap tracks during a morning run and when he pulled them from the cloud and onto his iPhone the versions were clean versions instead of the explicit versions he thought he owned. Upon checking his iTunes library he did in fact confirm that the tracks he synced up with the service were the explicitly labeled ones.

Heine listed four tracks that he could confirm were cleaned up versions of what he had originally upload. Those tracks were:

• Kanye West’s “Hell Of A Life” from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
• Kanye West’s “Power” from My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy
• Jay-Z’s “Can I Live” from Reasonable Doubt
• Ice Cube’s “Jack N The Box” from Raw Footage

9to5Mac looked into the issue further and Apple admitted that this was a glitch in iTunes Match and not a desired feature. According to email correspondence between a 9to5Mac reader and an Apple engineer the issue is being investigated by the company and a fix is being worked on. Apple currently has no workaround for the issue.

While this isn’t a service breaking bug, it is frustrating for users who are paying a fee to have their music available to them on demand. Hopefully a fix will come quickly  but until then you may be forced to listen to a clean, radio edit of your favorite explicit track.

If this issue has happened to you let us know in the comments. I’m personally curious what other tracks are being affected by this bug.