Apple Music is the latest way to stream a ridiculous number of tunes on demand. And with all that variety, you’re going to get some cursing in there. It’s just how a lot of musicians work.
But if you don’t want to hear all of those bleepables and swears, it’s a pretty quick fix to keep it from showing up in your stream. Here’s how to do it.
On your iPhone or iPad, you’ll need to go to Settings > General > Restrictions and then tap “Enable Restrictions.” This will prompt you to set a password to control these settings moving forward.
From here, you can block access to entire apps, but if you just want to take care of the music stuff in place, scroll down to the “Allowed Content” heading and tap on “Music & Podcasts.” On the next screen, you can just turn off the switch next to the Explicit tag, which will block anything bearing that on iTunes, Apple Music, or the Podcasts app.
If you want to turn it off later, just go back to the Restrictions page and tap on “Disable Restrictions.” It’ll prompt you to re-enter that password you set up, and then everything will be available again.
On your MacBook or desktop computer, you can do the same thing in iTunes under iTunes > Preferences > Parental. Once there, you can turn off Podcasts, Internet Radio, and even the iTunes Store, or you can just tick the box next to the content you want to block at which level. You can remove music with explicit content and even adjust the settings for movies, TV shows, apps, and books based on their individual ratings systems. Restoring access is as easy as unchecking the box later.
Note that some tunes in Apple Music have “Clean” versions that will play if these settings are on, so don’t freak out if you catch your kids still listening to Dr. Dre’s The Chronic even after you’ve made the changes. The worst that might happen is they’ll get a little confused about the words cutting out and skipping and why they have to listen to crappier versions of these songs.
Evan Killham is a freelance writer who lives in Nebraska and isn’t interested in football, so he has plenty of time to play and think about video games. He has written for Bitmob and GamesBeat and sometimes, he even goes outside. But not too often because he’s heard there are bees out there. Occasionally, companies send free units for review. Evan subscribes to Cult of Mac’s Reviews Policy and also does not keep the items he receives for possible coverage.
4 responses to “Keep your kids ‘safe’ and remove swear words from Apple Music”
While I’m glad to see this tutorial on avoiding explicit lyrics it’s a far cry from the simple toggle in Music before it went into streaming mode.
I really hope they put that back in by the time iOS 9 is released.
What frustrates me is that I can’t seem to find where I can tag songs as “explicit” on my own. So, music I’ve ripped into iTunes from my CDs don’t have this tag.
Ok, fine, but surely the challenge for parents is to stop their kids from using swearwords, not hearing/reading them.
Won’t someone please think of the children.