Picture this. You’re asked to make something special, and you work hard either alone or with a group to complete the task at hand. Sure enough, you get it done, it gets released, and it’s a huge hit. Would you want the world to know that it was you and your team that helped make this very special thing? Of course, you would! You worked hard on this thing, and you need the credit that you deserve because it’s important to know who made certain things. When the Nintendo Music app was recently launched, gamers were interested in seeing what music was already on the app, and there was a lot there, but there was also something key missing: the credits.
More specifically, under every song within the Nintendo Music app, you’ll find the track name, the game it was first created for, and then a copyright marker that shows all of it belongs to Nintendo. While some of that is informative and nice to know, it doesn’t show off the names of the people who helped create the music. That’s important because the composers are just as famous as the tracks in some cases. Plus, in the video game space, we celebrate the composers who help make some of the legendary and iconic themes that we all hum in our heads when we think about the title. Plus, since some of these music tracks date back to the NES and SNES eras, there are classic tunes that need to have their composers honored.
Over on BlueSky, some people, like audio editor Nebil Mahari, have already noticed this and called it out:
“I just checked the Nintendo Music app, & they unfortunately don’t credit the artists behind their music. Once again Nintendo is trying to maintain the illusion that everything they release is created by a monolith, & it’s disappointing.”
Indeed, because there are plenty of iconic tracks to key Nintendo franchises that should have names under who composed them. While The Big N is a bit infamous for how it handles its music, as many YouTube users can attest to, this was a way for having everything under one roof and then moving on from there. Yet, now, we have a little bit of a controversy around this new app, and you have to wonder when or even if things will get fixed.
We certainly hope it does because Nintendo has already confirmed that its app will get more songs over time.
