About a month ago, Nintendo started bringing down the copyright claim hammer on some popular YouTube music channels. Among the affected channels were GilvaSunner, who had tons of Nintendo music uploaded to his/her channel. Another channel that was hit hard was BrawlBRSTMs3, a channel that hosted tons of extended versions of game tracks. Said channel has been terminated, much to the dismay of game music lovers the world over.
I'm sure some people saw this coming. GilvaSunner and other YouTubers have had Nintendo music uploaded for years, some even dating back more than a decade. Then, Nintendo comes in and is all like "Can't let you do that, Star Fox." Yeah, yeah, Nintendo owns the music so they in the right here. At the same time, they have not made it possible to listen to many of their soundtracks. Yes, there are soundtracks that can be purchased for Splatoon, Splatoon 2, The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey and Kirby Star Allies, some of their most recent games and that's cool and all but there are still a plethora of game soundtracks that don't have official releases. Some of the older games like Super Mario Bros. 3 and The Legend of Zelda: A Link to the Past got soundtracks released that have long been out of print, which brings us right back to square one.
As great a game company as Nintendo is, they still insist on being out of touch with the modern age. Want to listen to music from Taito games from the awesome ZUNTATA sound label? Head on over to Spotify where you can legally stream tons of their game music albums for free.Square Enix has also jumped on that same stream train. This is 2019 and Nintendo still wants to lord their ownership over their properties without giving consumers a way to legally have their stuff. It is so infuriating.
This brings us to Favorite Tunes, a (usually) weekly feature on the blog where I highlight six game tracks and link them via YouYube. Favorite Tunes has been MIA for a while now and that is partially due to Nintendo claiming music on channels. I cannot state how much I love Nintendo music. From the NES era all the way up to the Switch, Nintendo's games have some of the best music in the medium. If Nintendo is going to mass copyright claim YouTube videos that have their music, or in the absolute worse case, have videos deleted, it makes me wonder if I should feature Nintendo music in Favorite Tunes at all. I honestly feel that omitting Nintendo music from Favorite Tunes would be a huge blow to the feature. Nintendo music is used in Favorite Tunes regularly, often times, multiple Nintendo songs. I would hate to do Favorite Tunes without Nintendo Music.
Despite the title of this editorial, Favorite Tunes isn't the only thing that could be affected by Nintendo going after YouTube channels that use their music. Any type of music feature on my blog would be affected such as S3: Sensational SNES Soundtracks, Essential NES Soundtracks (I assure you, those are coming back, don't worry) and other music features that have been spinning around in my head for years.
Nintendo's recent actions also make me concerned for gaming music based YouYube channels. What if Nintendo starts claiming videos that simply use arrangements of their music? There are also channels like 8-bit Music Theory and Scruffv that do videos that go into intimate details about Nintendo music such as What does Mario Music Sound "Fun"? and What Makes Mario Music So Catchy? I don't understand every single thing those videos talk about but I found them to be very fascinating watches and would hate to see Nintendo claim their videos or for them not be able to put out content with Nintendo music.
In his video on the topic of Nintendo going after YouTube channels with their music, Arlo pointed out that The Big N could be doing so because they maybe plan to upload their music on YouTube officially. If they do this, great, I'm all for it. However, since this is Nintendo we're talking about, I expect a lot of music would not be featured. Oh, sure the popular stuff like Mario, Zelda and Splatoon music would be there. The lesser known jams from games like Joy Mecha Fight, Marvelous: Another Treasure Island Adventure and For the Frog the Bell Tolls, all games that were never released outside of Japan? We'd be waiting for Hell to freeze over before Nintendo uploads the soundtracks to those games.
Again, Nintendo is within their right to copyright claim the music they own on YouTube. But Nintendo isn't uploading the music on YouTube themselves nor are they giving us any sort if means to buy their music digitally outside of Pokemon soundtracks.
At the time of this writing, there is still a ton of Nintendo music up onYouTube. How long it stays up there remains to be seen.
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