I bought an album on Google Play Music today. Upon inspecting the ID3 tags I noticed a few ugly PRIV tags, but I couldn’t figure out how to get rid of them; none of the ID3 tag editors (puddletag, eyeD3, easytag, etc) or MP3 players (Quod Libet, Ex Falso, Rhythmbox, etc) would even display them.

$ eyeD3 02\ The\ Game\ of\ Love.mp3 
02 The Game of Love.mp3 [ 12.33 MB ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Time: 05:22     MPEG1, Layer III        [ 320 kb/s @ 44100 Hz - Stereo ]
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
ID3 v2.3:
title: The Game of Love
artist: Daft Punk
album: Random Access Memories
recording date: 2013
track: 2/13             genre: Electronic (id 52)
FRONT_COVER Image: [Size: 43274 bytes] [Type: image/jpeg]
Description: 

PRIV: [Data: 42 bytes]
Owner Id: Google/StoreId
PRIV: [Data: 25 bytes]
Owner Id: Google/StoreLabelCode
PRIV: [Data: 1073 bytes]
Owner Id: Google/UITS

It turns out the PRIV tag is actually part of the ID3v2 (2.3) specification (and I guess they’re technically frames, not tags), and it’s really easy to get rid of using eyeD3:

$ eyeD3 --remove-frame PRIV *.mp3

All clean now!