For any brand streaming music at scale, naughty words can derail a customer experience even when Santa isn’t watching. Two years ago, we introduced the Feed.fm Music Rating System to help our customers stream clean music in apps and avoid any explicit musical surprises. We implemented an MPAA-style framework (G, PG, PG-13, R, NC-17) to bring structure and predictability to the inconsistent world of music explicitness metadata.
Why do brands need a plan to navigate the lines between naughty and nice music mixes? Because the clean, censored, and explicit advisory data that record labels supply are voluntary and not closely regulated, it is nearly impossible for brands to rely on that data to deliver popular clean music or family-friendly content.
This inconsistency can leave you wondering, What does explicit mean? Since the definitions of naughty and nice aren't always clear-cut, our proprietary music rating system evaluates both specific words and broader themes like sex, drugs, and violence, giving businesses the precision they need when streaming music.
Delivering clean music at scale
As more households share devices during the holidays, brands are looking for the best clean music that keeps every listener comfortably on the nice list. Feed.fm's proprietary music ratings have become critical for delivering appropriate soundtracks to diverse brands and audiences, and being able to push music updates in real-time.
"Feed.fm and Echelon work together to deliver highly motivational, relevant music for our instructors and loyal members. The ability to deliver either more or less explicit songs while always including the latest hits is essential to our workouts." Mike Rabinovitz, CMO, Echelon
The explicit music rating system provides the foundation for music selections, including which tracks enter our catalogs to how we configure mixes (which we refer to as Feed Radio stations) for specific customer needs. This level of control matters because our business partners serve vastly different demographics, from family-friendly yoga apps to high-intensity fitness platforms favored by adult audiences.
Where brands land on the scale of naughty to nice
Our streaming music data tells an interesting story about what brands actually want. The vast majority of Feed.fm’s Custom Radio customers aim for a balanced, PG-13 sweet spot, delivering cultural relevance without crossing into the naughty zone. The PG-13 music rating aligns roughly with terrestrial radio standards.
Other brands take a more conservative approach, choosing a PG music rating that keeps their entire experience firmly on the nice list.
"YogaRenew's app serves the global yoga community. Feed.fm curated some incredible PG-rated music stations that perfectly reflect our commitment to making yoga and wellness accessible to everyone." Nicolas Goudy, Founder & CEO, YogaRenew
Some apps implement a hybrid music strategy with different ratings for different stations. This flexibility—spanning from G-rated music suitable for young children all the way to fully uncensored NC-17 for adult audiences—gives businesses optimal control over their branded music experience.
Making family-friendly music more accessible for apps
Beyond custom mixes tailored to specific brand requirements, Feed.fm also offers curated music packages featuring the most popular genres and themes preferred by customers. Until recently, all of these curated packages were rated PG-13.
We're excited to announce a new PG-rated, family-friendly Feed Radio package. This package spans six genres: pop, hip-hop, rock, Latin, dance, and lo-fi, and is available in both a general listening format as well as a higher energy version providing clean workout music designed for family-friendly fitness apps. Whether users are working out at home with kids nearby or brands simply prefer a more conservative approach, The Feed.fm PG Essentials packages deliver the hits without the worry.
The addition of this family-friendly music package reflects what we're hearing from customers: they want the cultural relevance of today's popular music while appealing to a broad demographic. Our expert curation team ensures that stations stay fresh and engaging while meeting these stricter content standards.
Explicitness & Feed Clips
Short-form content moves fast, and without the right guardrails, it’s easy for content to cross from nice to unintentionally naughty. Our new Feed Clips product applies a similar methodology to provide app developers with flexible explicitness implementation. Developers can select music collections that correspond to their explicitness preferences, giving them control over the music available to end users. This approach maintains the same precision our Feed Radio customers rely on, now applied to the short-form content landscape.
.png?width=800&height=419&name=naughty%20or%20nice%20music%20management%20green%20(1).png)
Why music rating systems matter
The Feed.fm Music Rating System represents one of the many ways we are committed to providing our partners with a unified music system. We manage the licensing, technology, and curation, so our business partners can focus on their core product while engaging their customers with an on-brand music experience. By solving for explicit music management at the infrastructure level, we eliminate a friction point that would otherwise require brands to build internal QA processes, navigate inconsistent metadata, and constantly monitor for inappropriate content.
By carefully managing explicit lyrics and music content, we help brands deliver an experience that stays consistently on the nice list, no matter how busy the season gets.
Ready to explore how Feed.fm's music rating system can work for your brand? Let's talk about the right music solution for your business.
2 min