Well, here's the thing... we DO have a baseline for how much Nintendo could be making from uploading their music to Spotify because other people have already uploaded it there before. If you search for "Super Mario 64" on Spotify, you'll find an account that has uploaded rips from the OST. If we total up the rips and covers in the playlist on their profile (which I'm not sure why the other songs have gotten taken down but not the profile...? But it's fair to assume the plays for the covers and OST would be similar) we get a number of 30,000,000 for an unfinished album. In that case, using the average CPM Spotify pays out to artists, we get between $90,000-150,000.
Now that doesn't seem like much, but we need to take into account two things: for one, this would cost Nintendo next to nothing to do, making everything basically profit. If you hire someone or a team to manage these accounts, all they would need to do is find the soundtracks, gather and organize them, and hit upload. That's it. It requires the most minute amount of effort on their end because all the work has already been done for them. They quite literally are sitting on a goldmine of music and not profiting off it whatsoever. It's not the same as releasing old games, since that requires making an emulator, getting the bugs fixed, updating it, getting rights to titles, and having to compete with fanmade emulators. This is something they could spend a month on and just sit back and profit. And of course, secondly, we aren't accounting that this is Nintendo of all companies. If they made a big deal that their music is now available everywhere, like Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, YouTube, etc. and they had all of their most popular OSTs available to boot, that is a ton of cash. If they made, say, $250,000 per full album at minimum (fair if they advertised it) and released 100 albums, that's $25,000,000 AT LEAST for just uploading OSTs of their most popular 100 titles. If they uploaded their whole catalog, they could quite easily make a quarter of a billion in a financial quarter (which would be a very favorable boost to their profits).
The napkin math may not work out exactly that way, but it absolutely would be nowhere near the lowball estimates that I've been seeing in the comments. It honestly just doesn't make sense from a business standpoint to not capitalize on this when you can be making free money. Profit is profit.
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Re: Another Popular YouTube Channel Pulls Nintendo Music After 500+ Copyright Claims
Well, here's the thing... we DO have a baseline for how much Nintendo could be making from uploading their music to Spotify because other people have already uploaded it there before. If you search for "Super Mario 64" on Spotify, you'll find an account that has uploaded rips from the OST. If we total up the rips and covers in the playlist on their profile (which I'm not sure why the other songs have gotten taken down but not the profile...? But it's fair to assume the plays for the covers and OST would be similar) we get a number of 30,000,000 for an unfinished album. In that case, using the average CPM Spotify pays out to artists, we get between $90,000-150,000.
Now that doesn't seem like much, but we need to take into account two things: for one, this would cost Nintendo next to nothing to do, making everything basically profit. If you hire someone or a team to manage these accounts, all they would need to do is find the soundtracks, gather and organize them, and hit upload. That's it. It requires the most minute amount of effort on their end because all the work has already been done for them. They quite literally are sitting on a goldmine of music and not profiting off it whatsoever. It's not the same as releasing old games, since that requires making an emulator, getting the bugs fixed, updating it, getting rights to titles, and having to compete with fanmade emulators. This is something they could spend a month on and just sit back and profit. And of course, secondly, we aren't accounting that this is Nintendo of all companies. If they made a big deal that their music is now available everywhere, like Spotify, Apple Music, Soundcloud, YouTube, etc. and they had all of their most popular OSTs available to boot, that is a ton of cash. If they made, say, $250,000 per full album at minimum (fair if they advertised it) and released 100 albums, that's $25,000,000 AT LEAST for just uploading OSTs of their most popular 100 titles. If they uploaded their whole catalog, they could quite easily make a quarter of a billion in a financial quarter (which would be a very favorable boost to their profits).
The napkin math may not work out exactly that way, but it absolutely would be nowhere near the lowball estimates that I've been seeing in the comments. It honestly just doesn't make sense from a business standpoint to not capitalize on this when you can be making free money. Profit is profit.