Streaming royalties for Bowser? Nintendo Music puts the company’s classic video game soundtracks in an iOS and Android app

Nintendo Music – Announcement Trailer - YouTube

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Nintendo has launched a new music streaming app, Nintendo Music, which features tracks from across its classic video game history. Available for both iOS and Android, this can be used by anyone with an active Nintendo Switch Online subscription

While this might seem like it’s come out of leftfield (a lot of Nintendo’s ‘side quests’ do, to be fair), it actually makes a fair bit of sense. The company has a vast back catalogue of much-loved themes, and a lot of fans will be thrilled that they can now access at least some of them in one user-friendly place.

At launch, Nintendo has definitely taken a ‘quality over quantity’ approach in terms of the content, but you do get music from Switch favourites The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild, Super Mario Odyssey, Animal Crossing: New Horizons, Mario Kart 8 Deluxe and more.

The archive content list is less comprehensive - just a few playlists apiece from the NES, Game Boy, SNES, Nintendo 64, Game Boy Advance, GameCube, Nintendo DS and Wii - but there’s plenty of scope to add all kinds of 8-bit goodness in the future.

There are various curated playlists, too, including a variety of ‘mood’ options and collections that correspond to particular game scenes. So, if you want to march into work listening to a Boss Battles playlist, you can.

Certain tracks also feature an extend option, which could be handy during focus and study time. You can probably get a lot done while listening to an hour-long version of the Pikmin 4 title screen music.

Other playlists are based on specific characters, and if you’re worried about spoilers from games you haven’t played, you can hide these in the settings menu. There’s no smart speaker integration, sadly - you’ll have to make do with Bluetooth for any wireless playback shenanigans - but you can download music for offline playback.

With a clean and simple interface that actually puts some ‘proper’ music streaming apps to shame, we like both the look and sound of Nintendo Music. Here’s hoping that it will be supported with more content, including some from third-party themes, in the future.

Find out more on the Nintendo website.