New 'Nintendo Music’ app lets you listen to 40 years of video game tunes — here’s how to get it

For years, some Nintendo die-hards (me) have been frustrated at the company's refusal to officially release music on streaming services. The company just fixed that in a very Nintendo-like manner.

Meet Nintendo Music, a new Android and iOS app that is like Spotify, but for Nintendo music. You can listen to high-quality recordings of Nintendo tracks from across the company's four-decade history of making game consoles, from the NES to the Switch. There's just one catch: You need to pay.

Specifically, you have to pay for a Nintendo Switch Online (NSO) account, which also allows Switch owners to play games like Splatoon 3 online. An NSO membership will set you back $20 a year. Unfortunately, there's no way to buy a membership to just listen to music. If you don't own a Switch, you'd essentially be paying for multiplayer services you can't even use, just to listen to music.

There's also a major caveat right now in that there's barely any music on the app on launch day. Nintendo has promised to steadily release new music over time and it wasn't lying about that, as there are only 23 games total represented in the app right now. The current selection is unusual; it includes two different versions of the Metroid for NES soundtrack and a library of every menu song from the Wii, but nothing from Super Mario 64.

Still, the UI is clean and every game has several built-in playlists for things like level music, boss fight tunes, and so on. The bones of a cool app are here, as long as Nintendo keeps its promise to add music over time.