My Grievances with the Nintendo Music App

As an avid Nintendo fan, I have long pined for a way to listen to Nintendo music without booting up my Switch or streaming low-quality tracks ripped from games and uploaded to YouTube or other less copyright-friendly websites. While some Nintendo soundtracks have been released on CD or vinyl, they are generally only done so in Japan and carry exorbitant price tags in the United States. Thus, for a long time, I have been a very sad lover of Nintendo music. My sadness was assuaged in late 2024 when Nintendo released the Nintendo Music mobile app, a streaming service available to Nintendo Switch Online members. Since then, the company has slowly rolled out game soundtracks and has even promoted some up-to-that-point unreleased games with sneak peeks into their music, as they did with Donkey Kong Bananza (2025) and Metroid Prime 4 (2025).

The app works much like Spotify, Apple Music, and other major music streaming apps. Each game soundtrack is presented as an album, ranging from titles as recent as Kirby Air Riders (2025) to as early as Donkey Kong (1983). Alongside these are curated playlists that assemble highlights from each game, specific types of music from each game (e.g. the ocarina songs from Ocarina of Time (1998)), and themes associated with certain characters like Princess Peach and Bowser. There are also Muzak-inspired mood playlists that bring together tracks that evoke “Nighttime,” “Break Time,” “Walking,” among other “moods.” One of the most interesting features of the app is the ability for users to loop tracks for up to an hour, simulating the way music generally loops in games. While tucked away in the app settings, there is also a function that allows users to flag soundtracks for spoilers. This hides titles from a flagged game’s track listing that may spoil narrative aspects of the game.1

For all the great and useful features Nintendo Music offers, there also exist annoying and discouraging aspects of the app. For one, the user interface leaves a lot to be desired. Most unnerving, though, is Nintendo’s erasure of the musicians who made such a streaming service possible.

In fact, there is a complete lack of credit given to musicians in the Nintendo Music app. In no soundtrack does Nintendo include a single iota of information concerning authorship or performance. Even in the playback chyron along the bottom of the screen, only the title of a track’s native game is listed where the names of performers, artists, or composers would ordinarily be in any other streaming app. Even when tapping a song’s “Track Information” button, there is only the track title, video game title, and Nintendo’s copyright notice. There is no mention of Koji Kondo, the musical architect of the Super Mario and Legend of Zelda series, nor the dozens of composers—Kazumi Totaka, Atsuko Asahi, Ryo Nagamatsu, Hajime Wakai, and others—who have shaped Nintendo’s sound for decades. There is no mention of the instrumentalists and vocalists who lent their talents to the performances of each soundtrack.

This is not a problem with Nintendo’s access to that information or their documentation practices. In fact, when soundtracks are released on CD or vinyl, composer and performer information is provided in the track listings, even as these rosters have run quite large in recent years. Rather, this is an issue of Nintendo's monolith-based approach to its intellectual property. “This is a Nintendo product,” the company seems to say, “Nintendo wrote the music.” The absorption of the labor of musical creatives into Nintendo’s corporate identity prevents the Nintendo Music app from being a true celebration of game music. More functionally, it also prevents users from searching for their favorite composers and from tracing a composer’s compositional voice over their history with the company.

Adding insult to injury is a subsection in the app labeled “The Artists of Splatoon,” which compiles the music “written” by fictional musicians in the Splatoon series (2015–24). There is a clear ethical problem when Nintendo is more willing to credit imaginary artists than to credit the actual people they employ who give their games musical life.

The Nintendo Music app is a dream come true. I am very happy to have access to some of my favorite video game music with the tap of a finger. However, Nintendo’s refusal to credit the artists who make their music the most recognizable and beloved in the industry is appalling, reducing nearly fifty years of musical creativity to an anonymous extension of the Nintendo brand.