How We Decide a Song Is Clean

Every song on this site carries a label and the reasons behind it. This page explains what that label checks, how a song gets it, and just as importantly, what it does not check.

What a clean label checks

Language. Any swearing, including milder words like “d***”, and “h***” when it is used as an expletive (“what the h***”) rather than as a place.
Explicit sexual content. Sex acts, undressing and explicit references to the body. Romantic lyrics about love, kissing or missing someone are not ruled out.
Suggestive songs, drinking and drugs. An editor reviews the lists and marks songs not clean when they are suggestive, centred on drinking, or refer to drugs or tobacco. A passing mention, such as a drink in a list of summer things, is not enough on its own.

What it does not check

A clean label is about language and sexual content. It is not a judgement of a song’s themes.

Violence is not screened. A song can describe a fight or a crime and still be labelled clean.
Heavy subjects such as heartbreak, death, grief or mental health are not ruled out. Many good songs are about hard things.
The editor’s review catches what an editor reads. It is careful, but it is not a guarantee for every line of every song.

If any of these matter for your class or family, read the reasons and the lyrics before you play a song.

How each song is reviewed

Spotify’s explicit flag. If Spotify marks a release explicit, it is never labelled clean here, whatever the rest of the review finds. A song whose original is explicit may still have a clean edit, and artist pages say when it does.
Lyric analysis. The lyrics are read by an AI model against the language and sexual content rules above. It writes the reasons you see under each song, quoting lines where it found a problem, with swear words masked.
Editorial review. A person checks the results and marks songs not clean for suggestive content, drinking or drugs. Those reasons start with “Manual review”.
Corrections. When a label is wrong, it is corrected by hand, and the correction stays in place when the song is checked again.

What the labels mean

Clean: Spotify does not mark it explicit, the lyric check found no swearing or explicit sexual content, and no editor has ruled it out.
Borderline: The lyric check passed it, but its own reasons mention a possible concern, such as suggestive lines or a mild word. Open the reasons and decide for your group.
Not Clean: Spotify marks it explicit, the lyrics contain swearing or explicit sexual content, or an editor ruled it out. The reasons say which.
Unknown: We could not find or read the lyrics, so the song has not been checked. Treat it as unreviewed, not as clean.

Reading the reasons

The reasons come from the lyric analysis and describe what it found. On a clean song most of them say no profanity was detected. The check for explicit sexual content still ran, even when the reason does not mention it.

Found a song we got wrong?

Email contact@clean-music.org with the song and what you heard. We read every report and correct the label when it is wrong.