Nintendo Music Is My Favorite App for Background Music

If you want to listen to a soundtrack from a movie or TV show, you can usually find it on a licensed streaming service, if not buy the songs outright. Sadly, that's not typically the case with video-game music. Most game soundtracks are not publicly available, which is why YouTube is the #1 source for listening to tracks from your favorite games.

In particular, Nintendo hates when third parties upload any of their content to YouTube, whether that's game footage or music. Over the years, the company has gone after creators who upload their copyrighted music to the platform, even though Nintendo itself has offered few viable outlets for fans to find that music legally. Until late last year, anyway.

Nintendo Music is the answer

At the end of October 2024, Nintendo announced a new music streaming service, called, appropriately, "Nintendo Music." Nintendo Music is an app for your smartphone, and it resembles other music streaming services like Spotify and Apple Music, only rather than find music from Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, and The Beatles, it houses music from Mario, Zelda, and Metroid.

While you can find plenty of specific game soundtracks to listen to, there are some fun and unique options as well. Like other streaming services, Nintendo Music offers playlists based on different moods, themes, or even characters. There are playlists for songs inspired by Bowser or Peach, for example, as well as roundups of songs from boss battles, moments where you win the game, as well as when you start a new adventure.

The "Powering Up" playlist, for instance, has "Hyrule Field Main Theme" from Ocarina of Time, "Mario Kart 8 Title Screen" from Mario Kart 8 Deluxe, and "Tera Raid Battle" from Pokémon Scarlet and Pokémon Violet. Not bad.

How Nintendo Music works

The app is free to download on iOS and Android, but you do need to be subscribed to Nintendo Switch Online. (Any of the plans will do.) After downloading the app, I just needed to sign into my account, choose whether or not to enable notification (never enable notifications), tap through a pop-up warning me that some songs may be spoilers for games I haven't beaten yet, and I was in.

As far as streaming apps go, it's pretty straightforward: You choose a song or playlist, and it plays, complete with a still from its game. One neat feature is you can tap an "Extend to" button on certain songs to have a song play for 15, 30, or even 60 minutes. (But when are you going to add a 10-hour option, Nintendo?) You have basic playback controls, the option to repeat or shuffle, and the option to reorder a playlist.

If you tap the (•••) menu on any given song, you can choose to add it to your favorites, download the song for offline playback, add the song to another playlist, add the song next on your queue, add the song last on your queue, see more tracks from the game the song is from, share the song with others, or see the credits for the track itself.

A growing library (with some oversights)

As a huge fan of Nintendo music, the music, I'm mostly feeling positive about Nintendo Music, the app. This experience is long overdue, and the selection of tracks is relatively varied, especially now that it has been up and running for a few months. There are songs from many different Nintendo brands and eras, including new Pokémon, old Donkey Kong, even Nintendogs.

This isn't something Nintendo launched and immediately abandoned, either: The company has been adding new game soundtracks each month since the app's release:

• In October, right after debuting the service, Nintendo added music from Super Mario Bros. Wonder.

• In November, we got Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy's Kong Quest, Wii Sports, F-Zero X, and Brain Age: Train Your Brain in Minutes a Day!

• In December, Nintendo added Splatoon 2, Wave Race 64, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, a "Party" playlist, and Super Mario 64.

• In January, we have Donkey Kong Country 3: Dixie Kong's Double Trouble!, and, most recently, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker.

I still have a soft spot for those YouTube playlists I used to rely on for background music. Those creators didn't own the rights to the tracks, but they spent time crafting playlists of their favorite Nintendo tunes for others to enjoy, in a time when they largely did not exist outside the games they came from.

While many of those creators' efforts may be more in jeopardy than ever, Nintendo Music has not replaced one particularly important subgenre on YouTube: Nintendo lofi. While you can listen to many Nintendo originals on the company's new app, you can still turn to creators like GameChops for lofi remixes of iconic tracks. (I'm quite partial to "Zelda & Chill" playlists, but "Chilltendo Deluxe" offers a good mix of different Nintendo tunes as lofi beats.)

One interesting benefit to using the official app is that Nintendo is taking spoilers seriously. If you're worried about seeing song titles that may ruin plot points to games you haven't played or finished, you can go into Settings, hit "Spoiler prevention," and add all the games you want to hide music from.

Another unexpected move from Nintendo

Why is Nintendo launching this app at this late date? The company has been acting a little odd lately. While rumors swirl about the successor to the Nintendo Switch (lovingly referred to as the Nintendo Switch 2), the company has decidedly not made any significant announcements about it. Instead, they've dropped goodies like Nintendo Music, and an unrelated piece of hardware: a $100 alarm clock called Alarmo.

Nintendo Switch 2 news does seem to be immanent, but until that new console comes along, at least we can enjoy waking up and going through our days to the beat of Nintendo music.