When Nintendo announced its new music app last week, I excitedly downloaded it onto my phone. I thought I would finally be able to listen to the superlative score for The Legend of Zelda: Echoes of Wisdom without resorting to rips on YouTube.
I was wrong. It wasn’t there. Nor were the soundtracks to Tears of the Kingdom, or The Wind Waker, or A Link to the Past. No Super Mario World or Super Metroid. No F-Zero or Super Smash Bros., not to mention Xenoblade Chronicles, Rhythm Heaven, or WarioWare.
In fact, Nintendo Music, which is available as part of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription, launched with only 23 soundtrack albums: eight Switch games and one or two from each of the company’s earlier systems, excluding Wii U and 3DS. There are some all-time classic scores here, like Zelda: Ocarina of Time and Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, but as launch catalogs go, it’s extremely limited. For an app so clearly modeled on the services that Nintendo has so far declined to publish its soundtracks to, like Spotify and Apple Music, it’s a strange choice.
Those apps are structured to help users browse vast libraries of music and organize their listening within them, and Nintendo Music appears to be no different. The app is familiar and slick to use, it’s quite full-featured, and it’s well curated; you can download tracks, make your own playlists, or browse official playlists organized by theme, character, series, vibe, and more.
But right now, if you use the app as you would any other music service, you’ll keep bumping up against the limitations of the catalog. The same songs and soundtracks keep cropping up. When I’m in the mood to chill, there are only so many times I want to hear “Phendrana Drifts” from Metroid Prime or “Aquatic Ambiance” from Donkey Kong Country, as wonderful as they are. An official Mario playlist with nothing from Super Mario World or Super Mario 64 on it feels absurd.
In the here and now, Nintendo Music feels hobbled. But — literally as I write this — I have just received a notification of a new soundtrack drop, for Donkey Kong Country 2. Ooh! Super Mario Bros. Wonder was added the day after launch, too. It seems Nintendo intends to add new music at a fairly decent clip. And each notification from the app is a little dopamine hit of curiosity, or excitement, or nostalgia.
Could there be a method to Nintendo’s madness? I think so. Nintendo’s gonna Nintendo, and the content firehose approach of the streaming era — where you drown your customer in content, and then let an algorithm sort through it for them — was never going to be the Kyoto company’s approach.
Nintendo is far too deliberate and crafty for that. The company has always seen great value in curating its back catalog — and in carefully meting out access to it. In the case of the music app, this strategy has led it into the slightly ridiculous position of attempting to create scarcity where there is none; you can find almost any Nintendo music you want on YouTube, and there’s a bustling cottage industry of lo-fi covers of Nintendo songs on Spotify and elsewhere. Nintendo is often accused of being overzealous in its policing of its intellectual property, and this app could be seen as another example of that.
On the other hand, Nintendo Music honors the work by giving each soundtrack its own moment. In the absence of many personal favorites, I’ve enjoyed exploring the gentle, folksy jazz of Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a score I wasn’t previously familiar with. When Echoes of Wisdom finally does drop, the intensity of my listening pleasure will surely double. Delight, discovery, and surprise are much more possible than they would be in a single, giant library dump. You can have too much of a good thing, and a little focus goes a long way.
It’s such a quintessentially Nintendo approach. The app is full of them, both good and bad. Bad: the lack of credit for composers and musicians, sadly typical of a company that likes to present every work as if it has been birthed whole from an anonymous creative mothership. Good: the Extended feature, which lets you loop certain tracks for up to an hour, and the care and thought that has gone into the curation. The app is stuffed with clever, unique playlist ideas born of a deep understanding of the games, like the collected songs of Animal Crossing’s troubadour hound K.K. Slider, or a Zelda: Breath of the Wild playlist focusing solely on the overworld themes. It’s funny that the app essentially curates the shuffle function by changing the track order of the official playlists every day, whether you like it or not. That’s randomization and customization the Nintendo way, which is: as Nintendo sees fit.
Nintendo Music is contradictory, even conceptually silly — and its current scope is frustrating. Yet, if it had been done any other way, it wouldn’t feel like a Nintendo thing. I find that oddly reassuring.
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