Instead of Being a Normal Company and Putting Its Music on Spotify, Nintendo Has Launched Its Own Streaming Service

Image Courtesy of Nintendo

By Joey Broom

As acclaimed and popular as its games, consoles, and franchises are, Nintendo is also known for its distinctive and often frustrating quirks.

Nintendo is notorious for assuming any new piece of technology that might change the way it operates is a fad. It has resisted the adoption of many now-commonplace technologies — optical discs, internet connectivity, and HDTV support, to name a few — sometimes for years after they became industry standards.

For the past few years, the most glaring one has been Nintendo’s utter refusal to provide an easy way to listen to its music library outside of games. Your options boil down to lugging around your Switch to use it as a music player (yes, Nintendo has seriously advertised this as a feature), tracking down old CDs (how many people regularly use CDs in 2024?), or sailing the high seas.

The vast majority of the video game industry has long distributed video game music via streaming services, and many were left wondering when, or more accurately if, Nintendo would license its library to one of the major streamers like Spotify or Apple.

That changed on October 30 of this year, when Nintendo surprise-launched its own streaming service, Nintendo Music. The app is currently available for download on iOS and Android; there is no word regarding whether a desktop client is in the works.

Nintendo Music is accessible to members of Nintendo Switch Online, the $20/yr. subscription service that provides Switch owners with online play and a Netflix-like library of retro games. It’s a fairly solid deal, and even ignoring the Switch-specific perks, you would be paying far less for Nintendo Music than you would be for Spotify and the like.

At the moment, features present include downloading music to listen offline, curated playlists centered around characters or moods, and the option to loop tracks for up to 60 minutes. The app is easy to navigate and the audio quality is superb. For comparison, I listened to a rip of the Donkey Kong Country soundtrack via Spotify and the soundtrack present on Nintendo Music. The latter was far crisper and clearer, and the looping functionality is great if you need white noise for sleep or study sessions.

Unfortunately, the library is pretty barebones at present – only 23 albums were available at launch. It’s got some of the all-time classics – The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, Metroid Prime, the Wii Shop Channel music, and Super Mario Galaxy – but it’s missing much more, ranging from Super Metroid to EarthBound to F-Zero GX. Nintendo is adding new music every few days, but there’s no timeframe for when specific soundtracks will drop.

Nonetheless, Nintendo Music certainly shows promise, and it will only improve with time. Creating your own streaming service rather than licensing your library to a third party is a distinctly Nintendo thing to do, and it will be interesting to see how it pans out in the future.