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 (), 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 "." The reboot sound
for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system was composed by Rock & Roll Hall of Famer and producer Brian Eno.
"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."
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," . "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 [[link]] 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. [[link]] 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," . "I don’t like them."