Nostalgic Pokémon fans can now listen to the original soundtrack of the 2006 Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl games for free, thanks to a new service called the Pokémon DP Sound Library.
On Wednesday, The Pokémon Company announced their new service called the Pokémon DP Sound Library, free to use service that includes the complete original soundtrack from the 2006 Nintendo DS games, Pokémon Diamond and Pokémon Pearl. Pokémon fans can stream 149 iconic tracks and sound effects from the games on the Pokémon DP Sound Library website or on The Pokémon Company’s official YouTube channel.
The Pokémon DP Sound Library website is aesthetically pleasing and pretty straightforward. There are five tabs on the website: About, Music Box, Playlists, Sampling, and Download. The About tab gives information about the service and what users can do with the service.
The Music Box contains all the classic tracks and sound effects that fans love, where users have the option to organize the music by events, routes, towns, facilities, iconic locations, battles, villainous teams, and characters. In the Playlists tab, users can create their own “Party Track” using their top 6 favorite songs, or they can look through the four curated and themed playlists to match their current mood and moment for the day.
The Sampling tab will feature three surprise songs that use sampled tracks from Pokémon Diamond and Pearl. The other two sampling collaborations remain a mystery, but the tab currently features the first sampling collaboration with Japanese artist and DJ Alan Shirahama, who created the track “on my way to Glory.”
“To be given an opportunity to arrange Pokémon game music like this is such a fulfilling and wild experience for me. My younger self would have been overjoyed by the very idea,” said Shirahama.
Finally, the Download tab allows fans to download the Pokémon Diamond and Pearl soundtrack for free after agreeing to the service’s Terms of Use. The tab also includes guidelines for fans on how to properly use the music, where examples of permitted and prohibited uses are shown here.
Although this service was first released exclusively in Japan in December, its international release coincidentally comes at time where Nintendo has been copyright striking videos containing their music on YouTube. Recently, Nintendo sent over a thousand copyright claims to YouTuber GilvaSunner, who has been uploading Nintendo game soundtracks on YouTube for over eleven years. Nintendo copyright claimed several videos from their channel, which included soundtracks from games like Legend of Zelda, Luigi’s Mansion, Kirby, and Yoshi’s Island.
The creation of the Pokémon DP Sound Library could be a step toward more accessible game soundtracks provided by Nintendo themselves, saving them the trouble of having to sift through numerous videos to provide copyright claims.