Nintendo’s music app has great ideas and frustrating limitations

Listening to Nintendo music isn’t easy. It’s not available on streaming platforms, so I usually end up scouring YouTube for songs from Animal Crossing and Metroid. Because of this, I was hoping that Nintendo Music, a new app that surprise-launched last week, would be my one-stop shop for listening to Nintendo soundtracks. But while it features some clever ideas, there are lots of frustrations and weird choices from Nintendo that mean it isn’t quite what I was hoping for. 

Navigating the app, which is available on iOS and Android but only accessible to Switch Online subscribers, feels a lot like other music services like Apple Music or Spotify. You can browse tracks from individual games or hand-curated playlists themed around things like characters, Pokémon battle songs, or tracks you might want to listen to on an extended loop. It’s organized in a thoughtful way on a per-game basis. The fictional bands in Splatoon 3 all get artist pages with bios. The page for Animal Crossing: New Horizons features playlists for K.K. Slider performances and instrumentals, and if you want to listen to a full playlist of Kapp’n’s sea shanties, that’s available, too.

The extended loop feature is my favorite part. For some songs, you can choose to extend them out to 15, 30, or 60 minutes. I’ve already used it quite a bit to work to music from The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild; the calming piano sounds of “The Great Plateau” are still exquisite seven years later. I also like that you can add games to a “spoiler prevention” list to hide information about a game you might not have played yet, which could be a good way to keep yourself in the dark about a final boss for a game you might want to play.

But Nintendo Music doesn’t have many game soundtracks to listen to. Nintendo has more than 40 years’ worth of titles it could have included, and right now, there are only 25 games to pick from. There are just two Zelda games: Breath of the Wild and Ocarina of Time. Fire Emblem is the only Game Boy Advance game. There are three NES games, and two of them are Metroid. Technically, one of the “games” is Wii Channels music (which, to be fair, is full of bangers).

I could go on, but the point is that Nintendo Music isn’t a comprehensive collection of the company’s enormous musical history. Given that most of the soundtracks are for Nintendo Switch games, it’s more of a collection of Nintendo’s recent musical history, but it seems like a huge miss that I can’t listen to anything from Super Mario World in the app.

That will start to change, and probably slowly, if the drip-feed of Switch Online retro games is any indication. A day after the service launched, Nintendo added the soundtrack to Super Mario Bros. Wonder, and on Monday, Donkey Kong Country 2: Diddy’s Kong Quest became available, too. In the Nintendo Music reveal trailer, the company showed that Wii Sports, Super Mario 64, The Legend of Zelda: Skyward Sword, The Legend of Zelda: The Wind Waker, Splatoon 2, and F-Zero X are all set to arrive on the service, but only on a vague “over time” schedule.

Nintendo Music also doesn’t credit the real humans involved in making a song. That means, curiously enough, that the fictional bands in Splatoon 3 have more prominence in Nintendo Music than the legendary Koji Kondo. (Nintendo has kind of a weird thing about credits at the moment.)

The app has some other issues, too. You can’t extend some songs, and there’s no indication why, which is really annoying. One of the first songs I wanted to try the feature with was Metroid Prime’s soothing “Phendrana Drifts” music, but it’s not possible — which, given that it’s one of the main songs you hear on loop while exploring that area of the game, doesn’t make sense to me. Sure, you can just set the song to repeat, but that’s not quite the same as an hour-long extension. And when you select the duration of how long you want to extend a song, the whole song starts over; it’s a little thing, but I wish the app could just make the extension happen without the brief but jarring halt. 

And disappointingly, Nintendo Music is currently only available on iOS and Android — there’s no desktop or web app. I’d really like to listen to Nintendo Music from a Mac app or in my desktop browser; it isn’t compatible with CarPlay or Android Auto, either.

For the songs that are currently available, Nintendo Music is great. But so much is missing that part of me wonders if Nintendo pushed this service out the door ahead of the launch of the successor to the Switch so that it could add to the service later. It’s a similar feeling to the frustrations with other recent not-Switch things from Nintendo, like the Alarmo clock and skin-deep Nintendo Museum; they all have good ideas but also some weird limitations.

Nintendo Music just isn’t as deep as I would like it to be. It means I’m going to have to keep tracking a lot of music down on YouTube.