While talking with Bill Trinen, a product marketing manager at Nintendo about the Zelda Symphony concerts coming up in a few weeks (you can buy tickets to the show as of yesterday!), I also took the chance to ask why North America has been getting the short end of the stick in regards to the exclusive music CDs that Club Nintendo offers fans in Japan. I’m talking about the recently-released Donkey Kong Country Returns soundtrack, the Super Mario Galaxy soundtracks, and even the Touch! Generations music CD. I thought the recent release of the Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D soundtrack would have paved the way more more music releases, but perhaps I was wrong.
As Trinen explained, by making music CDs like these available in the United States, it opens up the gates for people to start asking Nintendo about licensing and the ability to use the music for other purposes (commercials, radio, etc.). Nintendo isn’t currently set up to handle these requests (i.e. nobody has the time to deal with it), so that’s why they’ve been reluctant to release their music here. I guess this makes sense given the stories that many of the game music cover bands and doujin groups will tell you about times that they’ve tried to reach out to Nintendo to “do things the right way.”
I have to say that it’s a little discouraging, but I still think the Ocarina of Time 3D CD is a step in the right direction. What do you make of the situation?
Tags: Club Nintendo, News, Nintendo
Nobody has time to deal with it? That’s insane. There are record labels out there that would kill for the type of licensing requests that are probably thrown at Nintendo, yet they couldn’t be bothered? What bs! Maybe they don’t like money.
What do I think about the situation? I think I will move to Redmond and just show up at Nintendo and say, “Okay, this is my job – I’m doing all the music stuff for Nintendo when it comes to USA.”
I could make them SO. MUCH. MONEY. Imagine if the Nintendo catalog was on iTunes… I WILL DO THIS JOB
Hooray for Mustin 😀
Mustin for president of Nintendo! Of the USA! Of the WORLD!
Seriously though, Nintendo needs to get their stuff in order and start making money. Like Mustin said: there’s good money to be made here and at the moment they’re just ignoring that! Totally ridiculous.
The answer is somehow… dumb. Even if they don’t have anyone for handling the amount of requests, where’s the problem to hire someone for such a job? Nintendo is one of the biggest companies in the industry with much good or even legendary music but they behave so goofy in this point.
Even small Japanese visual novel companies are able to release soundtracks!
I’ll take this job lol. Seriously it would make them so much money… I can’t believe they haven’t done it yet.
Nintendo has always been a bunch of lazy pricks when it comes to releasing music.
My views are pretty much the same as everyone here, but I would have thought that they would still be clinging to the outdated idea that VGM music doesn’t sell in the US.
I guess we should be thankful that they took the time to come up with another reason, weak as it may be.