The owner of a Canadian YouTube channel focusing on video game music reported that he had received more than 500 copyright strikes from Nintendo in the United States, which forced him to delete all videos featuring Nintendo video game music.
This is the second major withdrawal of YouTube from Nintendo this year. Although this is completely within the scope of Nintendo’s rights as a game music copyright holder, it is another unique example of the company’s absolute refusal to contact the audience.
The deoxysprime channel was founded in 2010 and had 165000 subscribers as of Tuesday morning. It mainly focuses on hosting video game music, focusing on the hedgehog sound series.
Deoxysprime announced its deletion on twitter on Sunday. On Tuesday morning, the video game publishing house began to report the story from the video game chronicle.
“I have no intention of deleting my channel,” deoxysprime wrote. “My other non Nintendo soundtrack will remain for the foreseeable future.”
This is the second confrontation between deoxysprime and Nintendo. Previously, the channel was affected by playing music from Nintendo’s exclusive games splaton 2, xenobale chronicles and bayonet 2 in 2019.
Nintendo had previously worked with another channel, gilvasunner, to carry out more than 1300 copyright strikes in January. The channel was then closed and the social media accounts associated with it were closed.
Whether official or unofficial, video game soundtrack has a huge market. Many game publishers and developers release official music through online services such as spotify and bandcamp, or even print limited edition collections such as full-size vinyl records.
Deoxysprime is just one of many YouTuber that republish official game soundtrack on the platform, whether it is a copy of the official version, a file torn from the game itself, a mix, a cover version, or something more mysterious.
There has been a struggle in the field of independent or self release for quite some time. A quirk in the YouTube system does not deal with game music like other professional released music, which informally encourages video creators to use the tracks in the game to create content.
Even so, most large companies seem willing to tolerate unofficial archives on websites such as youtube, if not encouraged.
On the other hand, Nintendo is unusual, if not completely unique, because it hardly serves this market. Over the years, the company has released several official soundtrack albums, which are rare outside Japan. The latest collection of Nintendo music released in the West seems to be the history of Super Mario from 1985 to 2010. This is a packaged CD of the 2010 Wii game Super Mario All Star Limited Edition.
In addition, Nintendo has not officially released any music on the modern streaming media platform. Although you can find some Nintendo tracks on spotify at the time of writing this article, they are all selected from the London Philharmonic’s 2011 cover album “the greatest video game music”. There is also a very popular cover version and mixing scene.
(there is a “Nintendo official” page on Soundcloud, but I doubt whether it is official.)
In contrast, spotify also provides complete soundtrack albums for games such as halo, stardew Valley, Celeste, the last of us, witch III, skyrim and horizon:forbidden West, which can be obtained directly from their respective publishers and / or composers. Nintendo may not be the only company that insists on doing so, but it is difficult to find another AAA developer in 2022 to maintain this legal hammer lock in its music library.
Nintendo has always been aggressive in protecting its intellectual property rights. However, in recent days, more and more fans, collectors and historians believe that this is at best just putting money on the table, and the worst case is to actively oppose the protection work.