A Review of the Nintendo Music App

On November 1st, Nintendo launched their streaming service, Nintendo Music, with corresponding Android and Apple apps. I think this is very cool™ and an interesting direction for gaming for a lot of reasons. Since I have already yapped to my wife about it for weeks now, I figured I would write all my thoughts down here. ^{[footnote 1]}

“Why do you care so much?”

I love video game music. Once I realized where to find it in High School, it was pretty much the only thing I listened to^{[footnote 2]}. I particularly love the intermingling of mediums that VG soundtracks have (music of any genre! the emotional intensity of film scores! adapting to player actions!). In another life I would have loved to be a full time video game music composer, but I’ll have to settle for calling myself an active enthusiast of the form.

I spent (and still spend) a lot of time cleaning up metadata for my local music library (and wishing I could clean up Spotify’s), and I have many opinions on how to organize, playback, and display this type of music. Adaptivity in VG soundtracks varies, but in general allows for a much more unique way of interacting with music than your standard music player would.

Nintendo is (to the first of my knowledge) the first major games company/publisher venturing into this space, and despite their own interests in putting their music catalog up like this (which I’ll speculate on later), I’m invested in seeing what they do with the service.

The App, as is

The service is free with a Nintendo online subscription, and practically, it works a lot like Spotify or Apple Music. I won’t mention features that work the same as they do in those services (i.e. downloads, repeat vs shuffle, etc.).

Music is grouped by game, and each game has a few playlists, like “top tracks” with the best known songs, or something like “Overworld music”. You can make your own playlists, and can also listen to curated playlists that refresh each day. They’re generally good (the walking one is my favorite).

At launch, music from 22 games was available on the app:

• Animal Crossing New Horizons
• Donkey Kong Country
• Dr. Mario
• Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade
• Kirby’s Dream Land
• Kirby Star Allies
• Mario Kart 8 Deluxe
• Metroid (Famicom)
• Metroid (NES)
• Metroid Prime
• nintendogs
• Pikmin 4
• Pokemon Scarlet and Violet
• Splatoon 3
• Star Fox 64
• Super Mario Bros.
• Super Mario Galaxy
• Super Mario Odyssey
• Super Mario World 2: Yoshi’s Island
• The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild
• The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time
• Tomodachi Collection

The very next day (Friday), they added Super Mario Bros Wonder, and have been adding one new game every Monday since, including:

• Donkey Kong Country 2
• Wii Sports
• Wii Channels (Wii Shop, Photo Channel, etc.)
• F-Zero X
• Brain Age
• Splatoon 2

Some of the more unique features of the app include the following.

Unique Track Art

The game’s cover art is used for some of the playlists, but each track has its own art, specific to where that track occurs in the game. When viewing a playlist, each song uses that art instead of the cover art.

It’s a really neat idea; most people will have never seen track names for these songs before, but they’ll recognize the part of the game where they heard them. No notes, great feature and shows that the app creators paid attention to the experience for casual listeners.

Spoiler Prevention

You can block a game’s soundtrack from popping up in curated playlists if you want to avoid spoilers for it. It won’t play any of the tracks, but they’ll still show up in playlists grayed out.

It’s a very cool idea; I had several bosses in Elden Ring spoiled for me because when I started listening to the soundtrack in Spotify, I could see later boss names further down the tracklist.

But I don’t think the feature is useful in practice. It works for games that I have a vague interest in playing in the future, but I likely won’t get to them (Super Mario Bros Wonder is the only game I’ve used the feature with so far). Usually if I’m playing a game, I want to listen to its music, but only what I’ve heard so far. By not playing any music from the game, I think Nintendo is missing out on a fairly organic way of increasing game sales (which I’ll talk about later). Given that there is some sync-ability between your game library and the app (it shows which games you own), there is potential for games to expose that sort of metadata to the app in the future, though I can’t see most games taking the time to implement something super specific like that.

Extended-Playback

Some tracks that loop in game will have an “extend to” option at the bottom. It lets you select the track’s duration (default, or 15, 30, or 60 minutes). It’s another great idea, and in my opinion is usable. My gripes with it are that:

• The song restarts from the beginning when you extend it. Since you only can extend a song while it’s playing, there’s always a slight annoying stutter I associate with the feature.
• I rarely go for the 30 or 60 minute length, and even the 15 minute length can seem too long. When I get tired of a song and check how long it’s been playing for, it’s usually around 9-12 minutes. A slider to choose a specific length would work well here.
• You can only extend a song when it’s playing, meaning you can’t make a playlist of 15 minute songs. You have to open the app and extend each when it starts.

The App, as I want it to be

More Games, lol

The small number of games is still baffling to me, especially with some of the launch choices they made. (only one Fire Emblem game, and it’s one of the Game Boy Advanced ones?). Smash Bros Ultimate launched with music from more unique series than this app had games (794 tracks from 30 game series, vs 22 games). They have been consistently adding music, but at one game a week it’ll take forever to add just their big games (and they’ve been going pretty niche with additions like Brain Age and F-Zero lately, lol).

Why are there so few? Nintendo hasn’t said, but I initially guessed that it was licensing issues, and not for technical reasons. Surely stripping music from a game is easier than emulating a full game. But in that case I’d expect more recent 1st party games (there are only 5 games from after 2019), and fewer older games, where the licensing terms were less likely to handle complex instances like music streaming. After noticing other features like the track art and pretty good curated playlists, I’m starting to think that the there is more technical work to prep a game’s music, like screenshots and sentiment tagging.

Better Categorization

Categories available in the app currently include:

• inner-game playlists (i.e. “Overworld music”)
• a playlist with all tracks in the game
• playlists based on Characters, like Bowser, or the Deku Tree
• “vibes” playlists, like “Walking”, “Sleep”, etc.
• Non-playlists, like:
  • each game screen will have “Related games” at the bottom with other games in the series
  • all games on a particular platform can be grouped by on the Search screen

Listing them out, there are more categories than it feels like. Possibly because each category is disjointed; some are only available from certain screens, even though it’s shown in more places. Even so, there’s still so much potential, even for more casual listeners.

• All tracks by a particular composer or arranger (the fact there’s no composer information available is kinda crazy)
• Arrangements of the same song
  • From different games (every arrangement of Green Greens would go hard, and if they ever add Smash Ultimate and its dozens of remixes of classic tracks, there needs to be a better way of linking remixes to games than just “related playlists”)
  • Variations in the same game. Animal Crossing’s snowy and rainy variations are a great example of this; there’s a rainy and snowy playlist, but no playlist for all of the different 10:00 AM themes. This does get difficult too since some tracks have all variants combined in them already; notably Breath of the Wild’s village themes (already present in the app) go from the day to the night variant and back.

Extended Mixes

Related to the above discussion of variants of the same song, a lot of games use adaptive music, where the music changes dynamically and seamlessly based on what’s happening in game (my favorite source for more about this is Scruffy ). Being able to smoothly fade between different versions of the same song, or a checkbox to add random events into the song (like Pikmin 4’s dynamic enemy system, which is sadly juet missing entirely from the available tracks). The UX for this is certainly trickier, but still worth it IMO.

Simple improvements

• How did they get away with not crediting the composer? I know it’s standard (the aforementioned Smash Ultimate music library also rarely includes composer or arranger information), but it’s still insane, give them credit now.
• There’s a known issue with playback on Android (I think it’s after the app is suspended, it’ll crash when starting a song), and a lot of crackly static if you download a playlist while listening to something (they messed up something with thread priorities there). For an initial launch these are pretty manageable bugs, but they can still be annoying.

Why does this exist anyway?

I’m not Nintendo, so I can’t say for sure. But I do think that they have a few reasons, some customer friendly, some not.

• Nintendo is legally very strict, and likes to use all of the possible legal levers they can to own their intellectual property. Nintendo wants to keep control of their music. They wouldn’t put it on Spotify, so it makes sense that they would make their own thing. Sure, it’s not as good as just releasing the music on YouTube or Spotify, and copyright shouldn’t exist for this long, etc., but it’s certainly a step up from copyright striking everything from the internet and allowing no valid, non-priacy way to listen to game music.
• It’s an extra perk for Nintendo Online, just a nice thing to have. I’d be curious how many subscribers there were before and after the announcement, to see if this app played a part in anyone signing up. For me personally, it will probably make me less likely to cancel my online, so I hope Nintendo recognizes that it might not immediately make them money, but continued maintenance will retain their income streams.
• It can get people interested in a new game. I heard a few negative things about Pokemon Scarlet and Violet on their release, and kinda decided that I just wasn’t going to get that generation. When songs from the games popped up on the curated playlists though, I enjoyed many of then, and it has made me reconsider if I want to get the game eventually.

Conclusion

I’m trying to be positive, and I do assume some level of technical competence from the app devs (possibly an unfounded assumption, I haven’t used many other Nintendo Apps). They really just need to increase the pace of adding games, and they’ve got a solid app.

Okay, that’s all the time I’ve got. I’ve gotta get back to listening to Animal Crossing: New Horizons on my Nintendo Music App.