It's a hot summer night and you want to kick back, relax and let the smooth sounds of Donkey Kong Country's Aquatic Ambience take you away. The problem is that your go-to YouTuber had to pull down their videos containing your favorite track. Sucks, right? Yep, but if you're surprised then you must be unfamiliar with Nintendo's history of stringently copyright-protecting its IPs.

Though I no longer make YouTube videos, Nintendo's creation of its Creators Program in 2018 was bad news for YouTubers. The move meant that in order to upload videos containing footage and stills from Nintendo games and monetize them, we had to be accepted into this program and also share advertising revenue generated by our videos.

However, if you were not part of this program, like yours truly, and still made videos containing copyrighted material you ran the risk of your videos being demonetized, which is exactly what happened to my accessibility review of The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. In 2018, after intense backlash, Nintendo got rid of the program and now allows people to use footage and stills from their games as long as they provide their own commentary.

Link playing the Ocarina

Nintendo is very protective of their music, so much so that in June this year, it was reported by Kotaku that they had placed over 500 copyright claims on videos that were uploaded to the YouTube Channel DeoxysPrime, which contains playlists of various video game soundtracks including Gears of War 4, and multiple Sonic games. Another music-based creator, SynaMax, posted a video to his channel saying "On May 31, a lawyer from Nintendo called me and asked me to take down nine videos off the channel".  The videos SynaMax was referring to featured copyrighted Metroid Prime music.

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In the video, SynaMax added "My research videos about the music from Metroid Prime as well as music done in the style of Kenji Yamamoto, those things are all ok because that's not copyrighted Nintendo music." It's understandable that Nintendo does not want anyone to use their copyrighted music, but the company is not really giving people much of a choice. You can't buy the soundtracks in album form, nor can you stream their classic tunes on Spotify (though there are plenty of lo-fi remixes out there).

Nintendo's unwillingness to make their music available to the public outside of playing their games is counterintuitive. If you want to put a copyright claim on a channel's video that's one thing, because that allows Nintendo to make money off of their own property without taking the video down, but to have channels take down videos just feels draconian, and undermines the hours of work creators often put into their content. Why not make a deal with Spotify to put their music on there? Why doesn't Nintendo just upload the soundtracks themselves to their own YouTube channel? Or they could just make a YouTube channel dedicated only to their music. It'd be a hit!

Doing any of those things would lead to less of a headache for both Nintendo and for creators. It's painful for me to see my YouTuber friends tweeting about the endless copyright strikes they get from Nintendo, as well as other studios and companies. In the end, these channels just want to entertain people, and it should be easier to have access to and use certain types of music. It should be easier to obtain the licenses to use music through proper channels.

Donkey Kong dancing to music

Yes, everyone knows famous series like Mario and others, but Nintendo not making their music available on any music-based platform is robbing their fans of nostalgia.  Music is a gateway to nostalgia, and the more people who have access to it the more popular the music and the property it's attached to become.

I would love nothing more than to get pumped up at the gym by listening to the soundtrack from Mario Kart 64 or the Metroid Prime series during my daily workouts. Until that becomes possible,  I guess there's not much for me to do but to listen to 'Paint It Black’ on repeat.