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The original music for Minecraft, alongside the reboot jingle for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system, have been inducted into the National Recording Registry at the Library of Congress and are now part of the American audio canon.
These were two of the 25 recordings that make up 2025’s additions (thanks AP), all of which were chosen for their “cultural, historical or aesthetic importance in the nation’s recorded sound heritage.”
“These are the sounds of America, our wide-ranging history and culture” said Librarian of Congress Carla Hayden. “The National Recording Registry is our evolving nation’s playlist.”
The Minecraft OST was composed by German producer Daniel Rosenfeld (known professionally as C418) and released as the 2011 album “Minecraft: Volume Alpha.” The reboot sound for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system was composed by Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and producer Brian Eno.
They’re in pretty incredible company. The other inductees include Miles Davis’ seminal 1970 album “Bitches Brew”, considered to be among the greatest jazz albums of all time, and a recording that the Penguin Guide to Jazz describes as “one of the most remarkable creative statements of the last half-century.”
Also inducted was Elton John’s 1973 album “Goodbye Yellow Brick Road”, Tracy Chapman’s eponymous 1988 album, Mary J. Blige’s 1994 recording “My Life”, 2006’s Back to Black by Amy Winehouse, and the 2015 original Broadway cast recording of the Hamilton soundtrack, composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. As well as albums the singles “I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar” (Helen Reddy, 1972) and “My Heart Will Go On” (Celine Dion, 1997) enter the archive.
As for the Minecraft soundtrack, in an old Reddit AMA Daniel Rosenfeld recalls that “Markus [Persson] found me pretty early on, on an old IRC channel from a similarly old blog called TIGSource. We hung out there basically daily throwing our work back and forth until something clicked for Markus. I think our specific weird kinds of music interests just clicked in a way that made Markus choose for me to do it all.
“Making music for videogames is arguably three- and sometimes four- dimensional. The player oftentimes controls the screen, which means we have to predict the outcome to make sense. In the case of Minecraft for example, that was mostly a big fat ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. I mean, there was thought put into it, but we chose the music to specifically be random because it was an easier solution than for it to trigger specifically to events. The game is completely random, so I chose to go into that as well. And that’s just for Minecraft! You could go so wild with conceptualising audio design.”
PC users of a certain vintage will recognise Brian Eno’s Windows 95 startup theme instantly:
Eno was given a list of concepts that the composition needed to capture, and a target running time of just over three seconds. The final composition ended up more like six seconds long.
“The idea came up at the time when I was completely bereft of ideas,” Eno said in a 1996 interview. “I’d been working on my own music for a while and was quite lost, actually. And I really appreciated someone coming along and saying, ‘Here’s a specific problem—solve it.’
“The thing from the agency said, ‘We want a piece of music that is inspiring, universal, blah-blah, da-da-da, optimistic, futuristic, sentimental, emotional,’ this whole list of adjectives, and then at the bottom it said ‘and it must be 3.25 seconds long.’
“I thought this was so funny and an amazing thought to actually try to make a little piece of music. It’s like making a tiny little jewel.”
Eno ended up producing 84 miniature compositions. “I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music,” said the musician. “I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of this that it really broke a logjam in my own work. Then when I’d finished that and I went back to working with pieces that were like three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time.”
Funnily enough, the iconic composition was created on an Apple Mac. “I’ve never used a PC in my life,” Eno told the BBC in 2009. “I don’t like them.”
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Kurt Indovina
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