What happened to all of the curse words in iTunes Radio?

As expected, Apple introduced a new streaming music service on Monday during its WWDC keynote. It’s built into the Music app in iOS 7, and it plays full songs, at random, based on a genre, album or artist of your choosing. It’s a lot like Pandora.

But it’s better than Pandora. I can’t explain it, but I’ve been using it non stop the past two days and it almost always feels like the DJ is playing my song. Maybe it’s magic. Or maybe it’s my 5+ years of iTunes purchase history. Either way, it rocks.

My only complaint about the service is that, for some reason, there doesn’t seem to be any music with explicit lyrics. Even with rap songs, all I get are edited versions. So I have to ask, Apple, what happened to all of the curse words in iTunes Radio?

I’m not the only one that noticed the music is missing profanity. A quick scan of Twitter shows a slew of complaints regarding the lack of curse words in Radio tracks. And the folks over at Cult of Mac appear to be seeing the same thing on their end.

But it isn’t an ‘everybody’ thing. Some users have reported hearing songs with explicit lyrics, so there are a few theories floating around. Maybe it’s a bug, like we saw last year with iTunes Match. Or maybe the profanity is reserved for Match members.

I looked, and I haven’t found a way to manually enable explicit lyrics like you can in Pandora. And there’s no way to tell a clean version from an explicit version, like you can in Spotify. So it’s either intentional, a bug, or I’m just getting seriously unlucky.

Whatever the reason, I sincerely hope it changes. It’s not just that the cuss words are gone, but sometimes it totally changes the song. You either get completely different lyrics/entire verses, or you get skipping and sound effects in place of the swearing.

Having said all of that, we’re still in the first iOS 7 beta. And the public version of iTunes Radio won’t be available until the fall. So here’s hoping this is just a minor issue and it’ll be fixed by launch time. Because if not, the service is going to be a tough sell.