from the all-that-for-this? dept

Nintendo Releases App For Game Music And The Reactions Are Priceless

For half a decade now, we have followed along with the war that Nintendo decided to wage on its own fans’ celebration of what is admittedly great music coming from Nintendo games. Starting in 2019, Nintendo has continuously ramped up its war efforts, particularly against YouTubers and their accounts. It started with the takedowns of a few hundred videos, before that exploded into the thousands. Both those YouTubers and fans alike have pointed out throughout all of this that much of this music remained entirely unavailable to fans through any sort of legit means.

That led to some speculation over the past few years that Nintendo was planning to release this music through some official means and was clearing the way for that release. Well, it turns out that speculation was somewhat true, with Nintendo recently announcing its Nintendo Music mobile app. Here’s the announcement video from, ironically, YouTube.

Now, some outlets, and even some fan feedback, have had some positive things to say about the app. Much of that positivity is geared towards the slick, minimalist nature of the UX. You know, the exact thing that Nintendo is quite famously good at pulling off.

But much of the other reaction is roughly what I’ve been saying about this for years. The music catalogue is a fraction of what was available via YouTube. Much of the rest of the video game industry has already released its music via streaming services like Spotify, or else they have just let the YouTube videos be, noting that they serve as a multiplying force for bringing and keeping fans of their games top of mind.

In other words, Nintendo didn’t have to build its own dedicated app for fans to enjoy its music. There are professional platforms out there already that know precisely how to do that and have tons of subscribers already. All Nintendo had to do was relinquish a modicum of control over its IP.

Look, I love video game music. I’ve been writing here about it for years and listening to it for longer than that. That Nintendo decided to build a legit method for streaming some of its excellent video game music is a good thing in and of itself.

But street-sweeping away music content from YouTube and other places in order to do so is a huge miss.