On 4 December 2023, Rockstar Games released the inaugural trailer for Grand Theft Auto VI, soundtracked by Tom Petty's 1989 deep cut "Love Is a Long Road" from the Full Moon Fever album. Within hours of the trailer's release, the song surged across virtually every commercial music platform, with iTunes being one of the most visible barometers of the immediate sales spike. The track climbed into the upper reaches of the worldwide iTunes Songs chart, with widely circulated reports placing it as high as No. 2 globally on iTunes in the days following the trailer drop, second only to contemporary release-week chart-toppers. This document analyses that performance, the streaming context that accompanied it, and the marketing implications of a 34-year-old rock B-side becoming one of the world's best-selling digital downloads overnight purely as a function of a 90-second video game teaser.
"Love Is a Long Road" was originally released in 1989 as the B-side to "Free Fallin'" in the UK and was never issued as a standalone single. It peaked at No. 7 on the US Billboard Album Rock Tracks chart on its initial release, then receded into the deep catalogue, becoming a fan-favourite album cut rather than a radio staple (Wikipedia, 2026). For three and a half decades the song sat as a comparatively obscure entry in Petty's vast catalogue, dwarfed in cultural footprint by "Free Fallin'", "American Girl", "Runnin' Down a Dream", and "I Won't Back Down".
That changed in seconds on 4 December 2023, when the song was used in its entirety as the soundtrack for the first official GTA VI trailer (Myers, 2023). The choice was thematically resonant: the song's lyric of a doomed, desperate romance directly mirrors the Bonnie-and-Clyde-style relationship between protagonists Lucia and Jason that the trailer foregrounds, and Petty's status as a Florida native dovetailed with Rockstar's return to its Miami-inspired Vice City setting (Wolens, 2023).
iTunes, while diminished from its mid-2010s peak as a sales platform, remains a real-time indicator of purchase intent because its charts update hourly and reflect direct consumer outlay rather than ad-supported streams. The trailer's release triggered an immediate cascade of users seeking to own — not merely stream — the song:
Crucially, the iTunes spike was not isolated. Spotify reported a 36,979% week-on-week increase in streams of the track, taking it from under five million lifetime streams to over eleven million in the first week and approaching forty million within months (Wolens, 2023; Dinsdale, 2023). The parallel iTunes purchases and streaming growth indicate that the trailer drove both immediate gratification (streaming) and a collector-style ownership response (downloads), the latter being statistically rarer in 2023 and therefore more telling about the depth of engagement.
The iTunes performance is significant for three reasons. First, it validates the cinematic-music-cue strategy Rockstar has long deployed across the GTA franchise: prior trailers have similarly elevated catalogue tracks, but the magnitude of the "Love Is a Long Road" lift exceeded all prior franchise precedents because the GTA VI trailer itself broke YouTube's 24-hour non-music view record, surpassing 100 million views in less than a day (Dinsdale, 2023). Second, it demonstrated that paid-download intent — long considered a declining behaviour — remains latent and can be triggered by sufficiently powerful cultural moments. Third, it created a measurable, monetisable halo for the Tom Petty estate and Petty's label MCA/Geffen, generating mechanical royalties, sync revenue, and renewed catalogue value years after Petty's 2017 death.
"Love Is a Long Road" 's ascent to No. 2 on the worldwide iTunes Songs chart represents one of the most pronounced trailer-driven catalogue revivals in digital music history. A song that had not charted in over three decades was, within hours, one of the two best-selling tracks in the world on the dominant digital download store — a textbook demonstration of how game-marketing assets now function as primary music-discovery vectors on par with film soundtracks and TikTok virality.
Dinsdale, R. (2023) 'GTA 6 Trailer Has Already Surpassed Grand Theft Auto 5's Reveal With More Than 100 Million Views', IGN, 6 December. Available at: https://www.ign.com/articles/gta-6-trailer-has-already-surpassed-grand-theft-auto-5s-reveal-with-more-than-100-million-views (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Myers, M. (2023) 'Grand Theft Auto 6 trailer brings back a 1989 Tom Petty song', Polygon, 4 December. Available at: https://www.polygon.com/23988499/gta-grand-theft-auto-6-trailer-song-tom-petty-love-is-a-long-road (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2026) Love Is a Long Road (song). Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Love_Is_a_Long_Road_(song) (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wolens, J. (2023) 'Spotify registers ridiculous increase in Tom Petty streams as GTA 6 trailer drives everyone dad rock mad', PC Gamer, 6 December. Available at: https://www.pcgamer.com/spotify-registers-ridiculous-increase-in-tom-petty-streams-as-gta-6-trailer-drives-everyone-dad-rock-mad/ (Accessed: 14 May 2026).