Searching, fairly aimlessly, for familiar songs on the iTunes Music Store, I turned up the following result:

I hope the asterisks were supplied automatically by some kind of computer program, because I would hate to think that human intelligence was directly involved in the decision to bl**p out the oc in "The Cock's Crowing Soon." Judging by what little I understand about the purposes of censorship, this particular instance is worse than useless: it defaces a pefectly innocent word, and, at the same time, alerts anyone who wasn't already aware of it to the existence of a taboo homonym.

Further searching reveals that there does indeed seem to be a (foolish) consistency to iTunes's bleeping policy. The word cock is bleeped to c**k in song titles and album titles (but not in artists' names) if it is an entire word, but not if it is part of a compound. Thus we find asterisks aplenty in traditional children's songs such as:

• "Ride a C**k Horse"
• "C**k a Doodle Doo"
• "C**k Robin"
• "A Little C**k Sparrow"

...but no asterisks in any of the following:

• "Cockballs," by F.Y.P.
• "CockJunkie," by Blood Duster
• "Cockring," by Polecat
• "Cockblockaz," by Duke
• "Cockblockin'," by Franco Callous Kush Unite 2 (FCK U 2)
• "Cockaholic," by Nasty Latins

Other potentially naughty words are, interestingly enough, not bleeped, again regardless of the sense in which they are actually intended. So, in the same set of results, we find:

• "C**k Up Your Beaver" (which is, for the record, an admonition to adjust one's hat)
• "C**k in the Pussy," by Cock Lorge
• "My Pussy's Gonna Make You Hot, My C**k is Gonna Drive You Crazy," by Kill the Hippies

On the other hand, "C**k Rock B******t," by Bonehouse, is so thoroughly beasterisked that it took me a while to work out what the original title really was. I'm not sure why they couldn't have gone with "C**k Rock Bulls**t" instead; maybe there's something about names of male animals that they find inherently offensive?

I'm not at all sure what the people at iTunes think they are accomplishing by this. To their credit, though, at least all the "c**k" songs do show up when you search for "cock"; you don't have to bowdlerize your search strings to find them. (Perhaps I should also be grateful that they didn't bleep out the kaka in kakas; I don't think their censorship algorithm knows any Hungarian.) But it all seems rather silly.