Nintendo Music Purge

Submission 17,704

Part of a series on Nintendo. [View Related Entries]

Overview

Nintendo Music Purge refers to video game company Nintendo allegedly filing multiple copying claims against YouTube channels GilvaSunner and BrawlBRSTMs3 which uploaded musical compositions featured in various Nintendo games. Following a mass copyright claim against GilvaSunner in mid-August 2019, calls for Nintendo to make their music easily available online have been made.

Background

On May 15th, 2019, 500,000 subscriber-large YouTube channel BrawlBRSTMs3, which uploaded soundtrack compositions from various Nintendo video game titles, announced that the channel will cease uploading Nintendo music in response to copyright blocks filed by the company.^[1]

We are removing all videos containing music owned by Nintendo, since they have finally begun to block their content on our channel. This is a fair warning, so we are acting accordingly to avoid copyright strikes. We don't want another situation like when Smash Ultimate was leaked 2 weeks early. We will no longer upload Nintendo content.

In the following days, the posts discussing the announcement were made on /r/Nintendo subreddit^[2] and on ResetEra forums.^[3] On May 19th, Nintendo Enthusiast reported on the news.^[4]

Notable Developments

On August 13th, an unknown person or company, presumably Nintendo, issued multiple copyright claims against BrawlBRSTMs3 and similar YouTube channel GilvaSunner, leading to the termination of BrawlBRSTMs3's YouTube channel^[5] and over a hundred videos being removed from @GilvaSunner's channel.^[6]^[7] On the same day, BrawlBRSTMm3 also shut down their website.^[8]

Online Reactions

In the following days, multiple posts critisizing Nintendo for allegedly filing the claims were posted online on Twitter, Reddit and other websites (examples shown below).

On August 15th, Twitter user @EvanEmanuel launched a hashtag #NintendoReleaseYourMusic,^[9] calling for Nintendo to make their videogame music more accessible by making it available via a streaming service such as Spotify. In the following days, BrawlBRSTMs3 and GilvaSunner supported the hashtag.