I have to start this one off beating a dead horse a little, because it’s a fun anecdote. Also, I gotta maintain the brand. You understand, dear readers. I recently represented the site at a Square Enix event, getting preview gameplay time with the new Final Fantasy XIV expansion, and interview time with Yoshi-P himself. The interview was a staggered group deal, and I had another journalist in the room with me. He asked Yoshi if Square Enix had plans to release the Final Fantasy XIV soundtrack on any other medium, because at the time Square Enix was only releasing music on weird, expensive Blu Ray sets. The answer he got was as diplomatic as one might expect, but Yoshi also hinted Square had issues with working with third-party distributors, aka sharing revenue with Amazon, Apple, etc. I’m burying the lede a little here I admit, but that story fits into the news here pretty well. That’s because today, Square Enix unceremoniously dropped a metric ass-ton of official Final Fantasy albums on Spotify and Apple Music.
It’s kind of a pain to access the music, because as you can see in my screenshot many of the albums are attributed to the dreaded “Various Artists.” That means searching for the official stuff means wading through covers and tribute albums that have been around much longer. Luckily a lot of the older stuff is attached to Nobuo Uematsu, and if you’re using Spotify, a thread on ResetEra (linked below) has made the effort to organize a little bit. Personally, I had luck with the “Final Fantasy soundtrack” keywords, but there’s still some sifting involved there. There are dozens of albums, including every core, numbered Final Fantasy title along with many spinoffs, including some of the mobile games! Perhaps most notable are those Final Fantasy XIV albums by interview session partner was asking about, which aren’t available anywhere else besides those Blu Rays I mentioned earlier.
More and more video game music is appearing on services like Spotify lately. Recently, several classic Castlevania soundtracks appeared on the service, and Capcom dumped a massive collection of music across several franchises as well. Every time it happens the drops seem to come quickly and quietly, and seem to come from the Japanese side (many song titles are left untranslated in these albums).
Source: ResetEra
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