Radio edit

Not all "radio edit" tracks are played on the radio.

Offensive content[edit]

Radio edits often come with any necessary censorship done to conform to decency standards imposed by government agencies, such as the Federal Communications Commission in the United States, the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission in Canada, the Kapisanan ng mga Brodkaster ng Pilipinas in the Philippines, the Korea Communications Commission in South Korea, the Australian Communications and Media Authority in Australia, and Ofcom in the United Kingdom. The offending words may be silenced, reversed, distorted, or replaced by a tone or sound effect. The edits may come from the record label itself, broadcasters at the corporate level before the song is sent for airplay to their stations, or in rarer cases, at a radio station itself depending on local standards.


One example of censoring profanity is "Talk Dirty" (2014) by Jason Derulo featuring 2 Chainz, in which the radio edit omits three of the words present in the song: "penis", "sex" and "pussy". "Penis" is replaced with an elephant sound effect, and "sex" is replaced by an echo of the word "oral" which precedes it in the standard album version from Tattoos (2013) and Talk Dirty (2014), and "pussy" is replaced with a sound effect of a cat meowing. Occasionally, the song may be re-recorded with different lyrics, ranging from just the replacement of one line being re-recorded, like James Blunt's "You're Beautiful" (2005), which replaces "fucking high" from the original version on his album Back to Bedlam (2004) with "flying high" in the second verse, to the entire song be completely changed, such as D12's "Purple Hills" (2001), which replaces profanity, drug references, and other inappropriate lyrics from the original "Purple Pills". Another example of the first type (one-line replacement) is the Black Eyed Peas song "Let's Get It Started" (2004), whose original title was "Let's Get Retarded" but was changed to make it suitable for radio play. Sean Kingston's "Beautiful Girls" (2007), in some radio edits, changed "You got me suicidal" to "in denial". The whole chorus of CeeLo Green's "Fuck You" (2010) substituted the word "Fuck" with "Forget", thus changing the title to "Forget You" on the radio edit. In Bruno Mars' song "That's What I Like" (2017), as played on The Steve Harvey Morning Show, "You and your ass invited" is replaced by an instrumental version; the same occurs in the line, "Sex by the fire at night". Taylor Swift's song "Betty" (2020) from her album Folklore, substitutes the line "Would you tell me to go fuck myself, or take me to the garden?" to "Would you tell me to go straight to hell, or take me to the garden?". Another example is in Fetty Wap's "Again" when played on SiriusXM The Heat the song is shortened to 4 minutes and 20 seconds with the last 23 seconds playing an instrumental intro version after "I ain't playing no games I need you". Another example is Move Bitch by Ludacris, which replaces profanity with sound effects. Another example is "Seven" (2023) by Jungkook of BTS featuring Latto, which replaces the line "I'll be fuckin' you right" with "I'll be lovin' you right".


Radio edits may have more or fewer words edited than the "clean version", because of the stations' or agencies' standards. A "dirty" radio edit preserving the sound of the offensive word or words but maintaining the shorter play time may be produced, which may be aimed at club play, nighttime radio, and non-terrestrial radio stations. After two million copies of Michael Jackson's "They Don't Care About Us" (1996) had already been shipped, the lyrics of the original track with the words "Jew me" and "Kike me" were replaced with "do me" and "strike me" due to its controversial anti-Semitic references. Radio edit versions of the track remained with the original version until the edited version was pressed and released. An example occurs in Lady Gaga's song "Poker Face" (2008), where the line "P-p-p-poker face, p-p-fuck her face" has barely noticeable profanities. Some radio stations repeated the word "poker" from the first part of the line, while others played the original version. A promotional CD single is available containing both of these versions.^[3] The edited version is also available on the compilation Now 31 in the US.


In an unusual case, Lizzo's "Truth Hurts" (2017) was edited locally in June 2019 by the market-leading Top 40 station WIXX in Green Bay, Wisconsin, not because of inappropriate content, but due to Lizzo's reference in a lyric to an unnamed new player on the Minnesota Vikings. As WIXX is one of three flagship stations for the Green Bay Packers' radio network and features wraparound content involving the Packers, the station determined that referencing their hometown football team's closest rival positively would be jarring to local listeners.^[4]


Some individual stations may be more lenient with words that tread the broadcast-appropriate line, depending on their management and programming format; for instance, a rhythmic AC, classic hits, adult contemporary or urban contemporary station may indeed make several radio edits to a song to appeal to a broad base of listeners, while a rhythmic contemporary, modern rock or hip hop-focused station might be more apt to have a light hand in their radio edits to appeal both to listeners and artists who would be favorable to the station's reputation. Some edits might even be done for promotional reasons; for instance a song that mentions a city's name or a certain radio station might see a special 'station cut' where the station and its community are mentioned in the song (as heard in Lady Gaga's "You and I" (2011), which has a reference to Nebraska that is easily substituted with another region, state or city; similarly, Sia's "Cheap Thrills" (2015) is sometimes edited to replace the line "turn the radio on" with "...turn [station name] on" to promote the radio station on which the song is playing).

Other terms for a "radio edit"