Nintendohas had a great week when it comes to making huge announcements on a random afternoon. First there wasXenoblade Chronicles X: Definitive Edition, a long-awaited port of the Wii U classic that has been stuck in limbo for almost a decade. Following in its footsteps isNintendo Music, otherwise known as Spotify for Gamers.
But Spotify is already for gamers, and over the years, major developers and publishers have begun to make a concerted effort to make official soundtracks available on Spotify and other leading music streaming platforms. Video games are a mainstream medium nowadays, so it makes perfect sense for their musical elements to co-exist alongside film, television, or theatre. Everyone got the memo except Nintendo, because it loves being different.
Nintendo Music Is A Great Idea With Lacklustre Execution
Nintendo Music feels like another example of the company living in the past, while trying to exact complete control over its musical library within a smartphone application that remains locked behind a Nintendo Switch Online subscription. Once you’ve installed the app, you will have to log in to gain access, then you will be presented with an assortment of playlists that centre around specific games, franchises, and characters.
Making its own application to store its music instead of joining in with the crowd is just like Nintendo, which is also still using friend codes, despite them feeling outdated when they first emerged over 15 years ago.
It looks exactly like Spotify, Tidal, or YouTube Music, and even comes with the ability to put your own custom playlists together or download music to be listened to offline. It’s unusually fully-featured for a first-party mobile app from Nintendo, but after parsing through its catalog for just a couple of minutes, some shortcomings soon begin to rear their head.
It pisses me off so much that, after decades of taking down uploads of Nintendo music with impunity, Nintendo announces its own music streaming service and it doesn’t even have the basic feature of telling you who made each song. Something that literally every music player hashttps://t.co/qVvSw2iKIv
— 🏳️⚧️🐝Bee’Jam Blues🐝🇵🇸 (on bsky now) (@Bee_Kirby)June 22, 2025
For starters, none of the tracks or albums featured on the app seem to list the musicians or composers involved with their creation. At the time of writing, the only thing you glimpse is the song title and what game it comes from. I clicked through the different options and didn’t find any way to gather further information. Spotify and Tidal have done this for years, while many official YouTube channels have a habit of crediting everyone involved in video descriptions.
Nintendo Music Needs To Evolve To Be Fit For Purpose
I know that Nintendo loves to keep the magic and mystique of video games alive - which is why it doesn’t reveal the developers of certain games until they’re released - but this pretty much feels like a gross way of not giving people their dues. This needs to change, or there needs to be an explanation as to why Nintendo has decided to obfuscate information. It’s a gross look, especially when the company has never done a great job of crediting all the people behind its greatest creations.
Conceptually, Nintendo Music is a cool idea, but only if it co-exists with music being available on other platforms and provides proper credit to its artists.
The selection of music can afford to be more granular, and should hopefully receive updates of a greater frequency than pretty much everything else on Switch Online. I’m overly cautious about that not being the case, but only because Nintendo has proven to us again and again in the past that it just doesn’t care. It shouldn’t take several months to introduce a random Game Boy Advance game to its emulation library, nor should it take weeks to upload the Eternal Darkness soundtrack for me to listen to in the shower.
Fans have also expressed justified concern about how Nintendo will react to music currently available on other platforms like YouTube, albeit unofficially. Over the years, it has developed a habit of issuing takedown notices to accounts that have dedicated years of their time to preserving and cataloging Nintendo music across decades of titles, and now there is a worry this will only become more aggressive now Nintendo Music exists. There is an official place for Ninty tunes to belong now, so why should it allow them to crop up anywhere else?
Nintendo is once again drawing a line in the sand when it comes to preserving the things it is responsible for, even if it will ultimately do a poorer job than the fans it claims to support. The same happened with Virtual Console, and now I worry it’ll happen again with one of the most comprehensive music libraries in video game history.
