The Nintendo Music App Is Quickly Becoming My Main Music Player (2025)

Being a video game music fan now is, like, a million times easier than it was back in the day. I’ve mentioned this before, so I apologize for repeating the same therapy topics, but when I was a child, I used to record video game music by holding a tape recorder up to the screen. This wasn’t always easy, as enemies in games would kill me as I waited, trying to get a clean few minutes of the looping songs.

This also wasn’t always fun because someone in my family would inevitably walk into the living room and look at me with the saddest eyes imaginable. Not to mention the fact that ain’t nobody in my life - not even my video game friends - were as obsessed with video game music as I was. They thought it was weird too. But here we are, in the future, and the Nintendo Music app is quickly becoming my main way to listen to tunes.

No One Does It Like Nintendo

Look, I know what you’re thinking, strawman created for the sake of this sentence: “But wasn’t the Nintendo Music app launched with only a handful of soundtracks?” Yes! But since then they’ve added far, far more - including recently Tetris for the Game Boy and NES. That’s not a needle-mover for normal human beings, but it is for me, a profoundly broken man. They now have so many good soundtracks in perfect, pristine quality.

We definitely need more in there, but the app has reached a critical mass point at which I can put a playlist on shuffle and pretty much have hours of classics. And some annoying stuff in between. Anyway, it’s gone beyond Nintendo doing a fun, but weirdly obtuse thing. Although, if we’re honest, that’s how Nintendo does a lot of things. They love a fun, but weirdly obtuse idea. But shine on you crazy diamond, because that Nintendo Music app is one of my few pleasures left in this decaying world.

Is it annoying that Nintendo mostly keeps official soundtracks to itself and only puts them on their own app? Sure. It would be nice if Spotify had those original soundtracks. But it would also be nice if Spotify paid artists better and limited the firehose blast of AI slop music. As it stands, Spotify has a lot of original game soundtracks from other companies and an infinite supply of Nintendo covers, ranging from the transcendent to so bad that you now hate the original source material.

None of those are the original versions. Even when you listen to covers specifically designed to have the same chiptune style, it’s just not right. A bleep is too high. A bloop is too low. I wish I was joking. I wish I was anyone else than I am. It’s like listening to someone at karaoke almost hit the right notes but somehow throw off the entire vibe.

Nintendo Never Wants You To Miss The Real Thing

Again, it is a little annoying that Nintendo gatekeeps its material this way. But we’re talking about a company that just released a dedicated news app. Still weird, but I kind of understand where they’re coming from on both. With the news app, Nintendo gets to handle the environment in which its news is delivered. We all know they’ll still repost announcements on social media, but if the big news keeps hitting the app first, that’s where fans will start turning.

I assume this means Nintendo can stop worrying that their big announcement trailer for the next Splatoon game isn’t saddled under a tweet promoting eugenics. They don’t want fans to confuse a parody account posting fake mock-ups and rumors for the real thing. It’s stupid, but we live in a stupid world.

And I understand it doing the same for its music. It doesn’t want fans confusing a cover for the original. In fact, they want fans to know exactly where the original version is. I’m not making a value judgement on that. Personally, I’d prefer to have all the video game music I like from all the companies I like on one app without me having to put in a shred of effort. But, for better or worse, Nintendo is very serious about people knowing when something is official.

If you’re going to be searching for Super Mario 64, you better be searching for the right one. They’re not screwing around with the Dr Mario theme. Yeah, yeah, it’s a little bit silly, but it’s also kind of perfect. I can finally get the music as it originally sounded without having to rip YouTube videos, download MP3s off half-dead fan sites, or most importantly, hold up a stupid tape recorder to the screen.

The fact that it’s all the real versions of the songs from the actual games makes the Nintendo Music app heaven for me. Maybe it took a minute to click because it took a minute for them to add enough music for me to not feel stupid opening it. But I do find myself opening it more and more. When I’m writing. When I’m reading. The rare occasion when I’m accidentally exercising. It’s far from perfect, and it’ll always be stupid that I can’t listen to all my video game music in one place, but God it’s nice to have the original version of Jump Up, Superstar, which is possibly the saddest sentence ever written.