Nintendo Music Review

2025-01-23

In late October, Nintendo dropped a surprise announcement for Nintendo Music, a music streaming app available on Android and iOS. Access to the app is included as part of the Nintendo Switch Online subscription service. At launch only 25 game soundtracks were available on the app, but Nintendo has been steadily adding one additional soundtrack each Monday, bringing the total as of writing to approximately 39 available soundtracks.¹

The app is quite well designed! The home page lists playlists you recently played up top, with featured Nintendo created playlists beneath it that appear to be based on your listening history. Several different categories of playlists are available, some categories containing game specific playlists, while others are meant to "Match your mood" (such as "Powering Up", "Break Time", "Running", "Party", "Winter", etc) and contain tracks from various games all meant to fit that theme. The next tab is the search tab, which displays games rather than soundtracks. At the top is a "Your games" section, seemingly based on which Switch and Virtual Console games you have played. Beneath that is all soundtracks currently available in the app. The available soundtracks can be sorted by console, order added to the app (most recent first), or release year. The final tab is My Music, which contains a "Favorites" playlist comprised of songs you have favorited, any favorited Nintendo created playlists, and playlists you have created yourself. A second page displays which songs and playlists have been downloaded for offline listening.

Within each soundtrack there is a "Top tracks" playlist, soundtrack specific playlists (these include songs from specific modes, areas, or themes, like battle songs), and "Related playlists" which tend to be character specific playlists and can be game specific or span several games. The Top tracks playlists cut out sound effects and short intro themes, as well as only including one version of tracks that have multiple versions (such as Dolphin Shoals, which as "Underwater", "Sea Depths", and "On the Sea" variants). This makes for a nicer listening experience than simply pressing "play all" while still giving a nice overview of the music in each game. One more playlist that is available for each game is an "Extended-Playback Collection", which lists all songs which support Extended Playback. This feature allows you to extend songs to 15, 30, or 60 minutes long by using looping points, which significantly saves on data usage and is great for background listening. There are settings for "Spoiler prevention" which lets you select which games you have not played yet, and the app will remove tracks from that game from any playlists.

All these features set Nintendo Music apart from other music apps, since they could not be implemented in third party platforms like Spotify or Youtube Music. The app is a nice value add for the Nintendo Switch Online subscription, especially since a large part of the target audience already have that subscription, making the app essentially free.

The app isn't all upsides, unfortunately. While being a standalone app does allow for the features mentioned above, it also means that Nintendo Music is completely unable to work with your existing music library. You're either listening to all Nintendo music, or no Nintendo music (unless you've acquired the soundtracks through other means). Additionally, the tracks present in the app do not always appear to be the most faithful renditions of the songs as they were originally heard. I don't have the ears to notice this myself, so I'll refer to a great video by James-Money that covers the differences, along with other aspects of the app. Many aspects I talk about here were first mentioned in that video, I recommend it if you want a more in depth look at certain parts of the app. According to the pinned comment on that video (at time of writing), Nintendo has made the same changes to songs in prior CD releases, so these tweaks may actually be intentional. There's a whole discussion to be had about highest quality/remastered vs original presentation, but that's not the intention of this post.

Additionally, while Nintendo is happy to create playlists for and highlight in-game artists such as K.K. Slider and Dedf1sh, credits for the actual composers are nowhere to be found. Several incredible composers have worked on Nintendo games including Koji Kondo, Kazumi Totaka, Toru Minegishi, Shiho Jujii, and many more, and it feels incredibly wrong for those composers to receive no credit in an app almost exclusively based around their work. Even the "Track information" window accessible through a menu only displays the track title, game, and "© Nintendo". It is unfortunately becoming a pattern for Nintendo to leave off credits where they feel they can. I have seen comments online to the effect that this may be due to culture differences, and that Japanese composers may not actually want to be credited, but not all songs in the app have Japanese composers. This rings hollow to me though, since in Super Smash Bros Ultimate credits are given alongside each song. Even the Smash Bros website shows credits! I would also like to see the app available on more platforms, such as a desktop app or web app. I'm glad that the app defaults to high quality (320 kbps) over Wi-Fi and balanced (192 kpbs) over cellular (downloads are all high quality), but the quality of my phone's speaker or my earbuds aren't as good as my computer's speakers and headphones. There is a website at m.nintendo.com, but it's only a landing page that redirects to the app stores and the root for support/FAQ pages and song sharing links. The fact that this website exists does give me some hope that they may plan to continue expanding the service, maybe once they have added a certain number of soundtracks.

I think the most significant new platform that Nintendo Music could be added to is the Switch 2. I'd get to use my living room sound system to hear the songs, and Nintendo would have full control over both the hardware and software to let them make an even better experience than is present in the app. I would love when docked for the small section of exposed screen to (optionally) act as the scrubber while the TV displays various visualizers such as gameplay clips from the associated game, traditional spectrums, something more playful like Wii Music or Electroplankton for the DS, or just a blank screen if all you want is the music. The Switch 2 could also play music with the screen off while in handheld mode. Carrying the Switch 2 around isn't as convenient as a smartphone app of course, but it could potentially be an option to use without the Nintendo Switch Online subscription or for kids that don't yet have a phone of their own.

Beyond just being a music player for the Switch 2, I think Nintendo Music could be a central part of giving the Switch 2 more character than the original Switch. The Switch lacked any music in its native menus, and even the sound effects were very plain. DOOMVEGA wrote a great post talking about this and explaining the music theory behind menu sounds in games and consoles. Despite being an incredibly successful console, the Switch's menus are completely forgettable when compared to the Wii, Wii U, or 3DS. I of course think that the Switch 2 should have music composed for its home screen, eshop, and other menus, and that music should be made available on Nintendo Music like the Wii system menu music is. However I believe that it should also work the other way, with users being able to create system menu playlists from any song in Nintendo Music. I might have my home screen play music from the Observatory in Mario Galaxy and the Deepsea Metro from Splatoon 2 Octo Expansion, while having the eshop play music from Beedle's Shop Ship in LoZ: The Wind Waker, the Armory from Fire Emblem: The Blazing Blade, and of course the Wii Shop Channel. This level of customization would instantly give the Switch 2 so much more charm, and also make each console more unique to its owner much like 3DS themes did.

Ultimately, Nintendo Music is a nice value add to the Nintendo Switch Online subscription, and I think it's worth downloading if you already have that subscription. A lot of fantastic music has been written for Nintendo games over the decades, and the app provides a nice way to listen to it. I revisited the app while writing this review since at launch it didn't have some of the soundtracks I really enjoy and the playlists weren't that interesting to me, but both are better now! Some of my favorite soundtracks are now in the app, and the included playlists have been really nice to put on in the background without needing to curate them myself (beyond enabling spoiler prevention). The "Break Time" playlist has been nice to listen to while doing chores around the house in the evening and "Good Night" was great to nap to, although it did make the absence of a sleep timer very apparent.

I don't feel that the app justifies the price of a Nintendo Switch Online subscription all by itself, but it doesn't need to (although if all you want to listen to is Nintendo music, the subscription is far cheaper than other streaming platforms). I'd still like an official way to integrate songs with the rest of my library, even if it's limited to buying the soundtracks on CDs and then ripping them. Hopefully the experience continues to improve with features present in other music apps like desktop/web clients, a sleep timer, and composer credits. It's a good start that I hope will keep getting better, maybe even to the point of being a defining feature of the Switch 2.

January 31st: Added that Super Smash Bros Ultimate and its website display composer credits