Thoughts on Nintendo outright purging many channels that have uploaded their music? (BrawlBRSTMS3, GilvaSunner, etc)
As always, Nintendo has every legal right to do this. Legal right doesn’t make it the correct thing to do, but that’s just how it is.
On the flip side, I’ve often wondered if something like this would happen. We kind of treat video game music as being “free.”
In the music piracy wars of the late 90′s and early 2000′s, video game music was kind of considered exempt. It was still okay to pirate that stuff. FFShrines only took its music archives offline because bandwidth costs were too much, but places like KHInsider and Zophar’s Domain still host literal terabytes of soundtracks from thousands of games.
That’s kind of messed up, if you really stop and think about it.
At the same time, “real” musicians still have their music up on Youtube, they just get to claim royalties by making a content ID match. Only the most anal retentive bands and singer-songwriters keep their stuff off of Youtube, because it’s probably a very good revenue stream (The Beatles, for example, used to forcibly scrub all of their stuff from Youtube – except even they don’t do that anymore).
You’d expect Nintendo would be doing this in preparation for their music to go up for sale on a streaming service like Spotify or whatever, but that other shoe has yet to drop.
So I don’t really know what Nintendo’s move is here, outside of just being rude. While it’s definitely messed up we treat video game music as “free,” a lot of those soundtracks are also out of print or were never in print to begin with. Nintendo better have some kind of streaming/purchase plan lined up, or else they’re just erasing a part of their brand awareness for no reason.
