5500 classic Square Enix songs officially added to YouTube

The music industry is notorious for having rather harsh copyright laws with a recent example seeing Nintendo forcefully remove over 1000 songs from YouTube. Fortunately not every company takes this approach, as Square Enix has now uploaded over 5000 songs to YouTube for all to enjoy for free.

In late January, YouTube channel GilvaSunner was hit with more than 1300 copyright takedowns from Nintendo as the channel had hosted its music on the service. This ultimately led to the entire channel being shut down. One of the biggest issues with this is the fact that Nintendo refuses to make its music accessible in an official manner – with those wanting to listen to a game’s soundtrack needing to rely on in-game music players or physical CDs.

In a move completely contrary to Nintendo, Square Enix has now uploaded 5500 songs to a new YouTube channel entirely for free. Making the announcement on their official Discord channel, Square Enix said “Various soundtracks from SQUARE ENIX are now available on #YouTubeMusic. Approximately 5,500 songs are now available as well as playlists based on various themes. ALSOOOOOO The official YouTube channel ‘SQUARE ENIX MUSIC Channel’ launched today! We deliver content featuring game music.”

The channel not only features complete soundtracks for a huge number of Square Enix’s previous games (from all the Final Fantasy games to the NieR franchise to the Chrono and Mana series to name a few) but also features new lo-fi styled multi-hour radio stations.

All in all, it is highly encouraging to see one of the biggest video game publishers release their back catalog of iconic music titles to everyone for free. Hopefully other publishers follow suit. The channel can be found HERE.

KitGuru says: What do you think of video game music? Do you listen to it? Who is your favourite composer? Let us know down below.

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