There are several video game soundtracks that have been uploaded (almost certainly without permission from the publishers) to Spotify and sometimes some other digital platforms. These include:
Game Monsters, which uploaded the soundtracks of Mario Kart 7, Mario Kart 64, Mario Kart: Double Dash!! and Luigi’s Mansion
Controller Mode, which uploaded the soundtracks of Turok 3: Shadow of Oblivion, Diddy Kong Racing, Kirby Triple Deluxe and 1080° Snowboarding
Tendo Kid, which uploaded parts of the soundtracks of Super Smash Bros. and Super Smash Bros. Melee
as well as a number of other artists.
Most of these tracks, according to the Spotify desktop app, were discovered by Spotify users through an apparently comprehensive set of about 100 playlists created by Nintendo OST – Just Damian 3, whose profile picture is a text-only image:
Just Damian
makes the lists,
So you can
enjoy them
The playlists appear to be a mixture of official and not-so-official releases. The Trials Of Mana playlist, for example, is just all the tracks from the actual soundtrack album; the developer Square Enix is listed correctly in both the C and P copyright fields, and the ISRCs were registered in 2006.
Most of the bootleg uploads can be identified by being uploaded as singles with “(Original)” or “[Original]” in the single title and " - Original" in the track title. All of the tracks apparently have ISRCs (all registered in 2019 in Japan), although at least one of them (JPGAM1956601) is assigned to two different tracks: “Title Theme” from Super Mario 64 and “Whale Bay” from Diddy Kong Racing.
Anyway, the questions I was originally going to ask:
Is there a way to batch upload these as singles? All of the singles apparently have their own barcodes, so it wouldn’t be possible to combine them. However, each account only uses one or a few album covers for all of their singles. It takes me about five to ten minutes to create a new release manually, and there are about a thousand singles [Edit: there are about 563]. Needless to say, I’m not going to do that.
Should the ISRCs be added? Some/all of the actual game soundtracks published by Nintendo already have ISRCs.
Should all of the releases use the existing recordings? It is possible that the uploader(s) used different sources or manually emulated some of the soundtracks (or that the original source(s) of the audio files did so).
I wasn’t suggesting adding the playlists at any point. They were just useful for navigating between the releases, although I’ve collected the relevant data elsewhere so it’s a moot point.
My assumption (based on a prior discussion) was that it would be useful to add the bootleg releases, since they’ve existed for almost a year and have accumulated millions of Spotify plays.
I find the world of video game bootlegs fascinating, and love editing that kind of stuff on MB.
Video game music is in a very difficult space right now, but I am hoping it is a space of transition, and I don’t think cataloguing bootlegs is a bad thing, particularly when you can use it to lead people to a release group with an official release.
Anyway, that wasn’t that helpful haha - I think at the end of the day there will be some manual work. There might be a script that can help?
I wonder if this still works:
Unless there’s a good reason to merge the recordings (eg track times are the same across the whole official release vs the singles) I would lean towards not merging them, especially gem older games where there are often a lot of different rips floating around.
It should (I’ve not heard of anything that would break it anyway), but I don’t see myself maintaining it anymore. There’s a more functional project that does the same but also includes Deezer and iTunes/Apple Music data, links to an ISRC importer, and does other nifty stuff… and runs from the browser, so people don’t have to mess with Python and command-line stuff. Check it out:
Hi there, i was the creator of these playlists. But unfortunately, i have stopped doing that because of circumstances on that platform, sadly. I’ve had more profiles but i have deleted them all, i’m sorry for that.
Please notice, that these playlist were just for fun, and i have nothing to do with these singles.
However, if you are interested, at this moment, i am now a music editor that makes 8 Bit music. I have a YouTube channel, named Mr. - Just Damian. And i hope you like my music.
