In fact, Minecraft’s soundtrack has become part of the Library of Congress, meaning it is recognized and preserved by the United States.

The original Minecraft soundtrack and the startup theme for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system have been added to the Library of Congress’ National Sound Recordings Registry and are now part of the U.S. soundtrack canon. These are two of the 25 recordings in the 2025 recordings, each selected for their cultural, historical, or aesthetic significance to the nation’s recorded sound heritage.

The Minecraft soundtrack was composed by German producer Daniel Rosenfeld (C418) and released in 2011 (Minecraft: Volume Alpha), while the opening theme for Microsoft’s Windows 95 operating system was composed by Brian Eno. Rosenfeld and Eno were in some pretty elite company. Other recordings include Miles Davis’ landmark 1970 album Bitches Brew, Elton John’s 1973 Goodbye Yellow Brick Road, Tracy Chapman’s 1988 album of the same name, Mary J. Blige’s 1994 My Life, Amy Winehouse’s 2006 Back to Black, and a 2015 recording of the original Broadway score for the movie Hamilton, composed by Lin-Manuel Miranda. There are also a couple of singles: 1972’s I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar by Helen Reddy and 1997’s My Heart Will Go On by Celine Dion.

Rosenfeld recalled the soundtrack in an AMA on Reddit: “Markus Persson found me pretty early on, on an old IRC channel from a similarly old blog called TIGSource. We hung out there basically every day, throwing our work back and forth until something clicked for Markus. I think our specific weird musical interests just clicked in a way that made Markus decide to do it all for me. Making music for video games is arguably three and sometimes four dimensional. The player is often controlling the screen, which means we have to predict the outcome to make sense. In the case of Minecraft, for example, it was mostly a big fat shrug. There was a lot of thought put into it, but we chose to make the music specifically random because it was an easier solution than having it specifically trigger events. The game is completely random, so I decided to go with that as well. And that’s just for Minecraft! You can go so wild with audio design concepts,” Rosenfeld said.

Eno was given a list of concepts that the composition had to capture, all crammed into just over 3 seconds… but the final composition ended up being closer to 6 seconds. “The idea came at a time when I was completely out of ideas. I had been working on my own music for a while and I was really lost. 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 that 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. I composed 84 of them. I got completely into this world of tiny, tiny little pieces of music. I was so sensitive to microseconds at the end of it that it really broke a logjam in my own work. When I finished that and went back to working with pieces that were three minutes long, it seemed like oceans of time,” Eno said in a 1996 interview.

The joke? Eno later revealed to the BBC that he’d never worked on a PC, and that this was also written on a Mac…

Source: PCGamer