Google Music Swapping Explicit Lyrics in Users' Songs For Clean Versions: How to Fix Your Music Collection

Google Music, the tech giant's cloud storage and music playback service, is replacing some users' explicit songs with clean versions.

The switch comes after Google announced its Scan and Match feature. Previously, users could upload their music to Google's servers and play it back at any computer or mobile device.

In order to streamline the upload process, Google started replacing users' songs with identical versions from Google's music database.

So, for example, if a Google Music user wanted to upload their copy of Nirvana's "Smells Like Teen Spirit" to their online music collection, Google simply linked it to the file it already has in its database, rather than wasting bandwidth uploading an identical song from hundreds or thousands of individual users.

In theory, that sounds great. But apparently some of the Google database versions of songs have "clean" lyrics - they've had explicit lyrics or swearing replaced, removed or otherwise obfuscated.

So a Google Music version of, for example, Cee Lo Green's innocuously titled "Forget You" could replace the original title and lyrics which feature a more crass and usually inappropriate word also beginning with "F."

And, of course, music purists aren't happy about this. On occasion, the opposite issue occurs, where a clean version of a song - perhaps for use around the family - is swapped with an explicit one.

Fortunately, there is a solution, though not an elegant one. Clicking the arrow next to a song in the Google Music Manager pops out a menu. Click "Fix incorrect match" to force Google to upload the original song file, rather than relying on the cloud database.