For most of its history, Grand Theft Auto treated music as a curatorial problem rather than a compositional one. The defining audio question was not "what should the score sound like?" but "what should the radio dial sound like?" — an inversion of every other AAA franchise of the period. That orientation began to bend in 2010 with Red Dead Redemption, broke decisively in 2013 when Grand Theft Auto V shipped with an original score for the first time in the series' history (Wikipedia, 2025a), and reached its full inversion in 2018, when Red Dead Redemption 2 foregrounded a roughly sixty-hour Woody Jackson score and treated licensed vocals as accents rather than the main event (Wikipedia, 2025b). With Grand Theft Auto VI targeting a 2020s Florida setting whose cultural identity is partly defined by radio formats — Miami bass, Latin pop, Cuban-American talk — the studio now faces a curation problem fundamentally different from the one it solved in Vice City. This report traces the evolution and predicts where VI lands.
The 3D-era model treated licensed music as the single most cost-effective tool for evoking period. Vice City (2002) leaned on roughly nine themed stations of 1984 catalogue: Flash FM's soft-rock, V-Rock's hair-metal, Wave 103's new wave, Fever 105's funk and Emotion 98.3's power ballads. The genius of the approach was that licensing 1980s tracks in 2002 was comparatively cheap — the music was twenty years old, the publishers were grateful for the placement, and players supplied the nostalgic register themselves. San Andreas (2004) extended the model into genre-station maximalism, with stations dedicated to West Coast hip-hop, classic R&B, country and reggae targeting a 1992 Los Angeles. Curation was the entire creative act: there was no original score to speak of, and the radio carried the cultural load.
GTA IV (2008) marked the first stress test of the licensing model. Set in a contemporary Liberty City, the game needed current music rather than catalogue, and a Slavic-immigrant protagonist whose taste justified Vladivostok FM's Russian-language pop and Eastern European rock. Acquiring such tracks involved licensing across territories Rockstar had never previously negotiated with, and the contemporary chart material on stations like The Beat 99.1 and The Vibe was significantly more expensive per track than 1980s catalogue. The radio still dominated the audio experience, but the underlying economics had changed. Music supervisor Ivan Pavlovich later remarked that licensing on V "involved a greater discernment than in Grand Theft Auto IV" because the team had learned the hard way that 900-track wish-lists became 241-track realities once budgets and clearances intervened (Wikipedia, 2025a).
Grand Theft Auto V (2013) was the first entry in the series to ship with an original score, a decision Pavlovich described as "daunting" because it was unprecedented within the franchise (Wikipedia, 2025a). Rockstar engaged an unusually heterogeneous quartet: the German electronic group Tangerine Dream, the Los Angeles composer Woody Jackson (already a Rockstar regular from Red Dead Redemption, L.A. Noire and Max Payne 3), and the hip-hop producers The Alchemist and Oh No, with DJ Shadow ultimately mixing the stems into the interactive score (Wikipedia, 2025a). The team produced over twenty hours of music for missions and dynamic gameplay. Tangerine Dream founder Edgar Froese alone delivered sixty-two hours of source material in his first eight months; Jackson initially scored Trevor's missions while taking influence from The Mars Volta and Queens of the Stone Age; The Alchemist sampled and chopped Froese and Jackson's stems before passing them back through the chain (Wikipedia, 2025a).
The three-protagonist conceit dovetailed neatly with the three-composer arrangement: each lead character had a sonic palette that could be assembled from different proportions of the available stems. Crucially, the licensed radio survived alongside the score, with fifteen music stations and two talk stations carrying roughly 241 tracks (Wikipedia, 2025a). Pavlovich's goal was for the score to "accompany the licensed music, as opposed to detract from it" — an explicit acknowledgement that the radio remained the dominant cultural register and the original composition was supplementary scaffolding for narrative beats.
Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018) completed the philosophical reversal. Set in 1899, the game had no diegetic radio at all; the entire audio experience had to be composed. Jackson wrote roughly sixty hours of music, of which only a third reaches a typical player in a single playthrough (Wikipedia, 2025b). The score uses three distinct modes — narrative (cutscenes), interactive (open-world traversal) and environmental (campfire songs, in-world musicians) — driven by an internal system called the "Gunfight Conductor", which alters stems in real time based on emotional state and player decisions. The system was, notably, first introduced in GTA V but overhauled for RDR2, indicating that the technical investment from the 2013 score was now Rockstar's standard audio infrastructure (Wikipedia, 2025b).
The composition went further than scoring: Jackson purchased instruments previously used by the Wrecking Crew on Bullitt, Butch Cassidy and Unforgiven to ensure period accuracy, while Daniel Lanois produced original vocal tracks with D'Angelo, Willie Nelson, Rhiannon Giddens and Josh Homme to maintain a consistent "through-line" complementary to Jackson's instrumental work (Wikipedia, 2025b). Over 110 musicians ultimately contributed. RDR2 is, by any reasonable accounting, one of the most expensive original game scores ever produced — and it is also the moment Rockstar stopped treating in-house composition as an experimental supplement and started treating it as a primary asset class.
GTA VI returns to a setting where radio is structurally unavoidable. A 2020s Florida Vice City demands stations covering Miami bass, Latin trap, reggaeton, Haitian compas, Cuban-American talk and 1980s-revival synthwave — categories whose cultural specificity cannot be approximated by an original score. The trailer evidence already suggests an aggressive licensing strategy: the first trailer drove a near-37,000% Spotify streaming spike for Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road", and the second drove a 182,000% spike for The Pointer Sisters' "Hot Together", with Wang Chung, Tammy Wynette and the Haitian act Zenglen also featured. The trailers are, in effect, functioning as proof-of-concept curation reels for Rockstar's licensing department.
What the trailers do not show is the score, but everything Rockstar has built since 2013 indicates one is being composed in parallel. The dual-protagonist Lucia/Jason story — a Bonnie-and-Clyde structure verified across leaks and trailers — maps cleanly onto the three-protagonist scoring template V established, with two character palettes rather than three. Jackson is the obvious candidate to return given his unbroken Rockstar run from Red Dead Redemption through RDR2. The likely architecture is therefore: licensed radio carrying the Florida-coded world atmosphere; original score carrying narrative tension during missions, interrogations, romance beats and the heist set-pieces the franchise has trained players to expect cinematic underscore for. The "Gunfight Conductor" or its successor will sit between them, ensuring that turning the radio off during a mission cuts seamlessly to a Jackson stem rather than silence.
There is a budgetary logic to this division. Licensed tracks are a fixed per-track cost with finite lifespans (delistings on the V radio have already eroded its original station identities over twelve years of live service). Original score is a one-time composition cost that Rockstar owns in perpetuity and can re-deploy across DLC, multiplayer expansions and trailers without further clearance. For a title intended to operate on a fifteen-plus-year live-service horizon, the hybrid is not an aesthetic choice but a structural necessity.
The arc from Vice City's catalogue-licensing to RDR2's sixty-hour original score is not a story of one approach replacing another; it is a story of Rockstar learning that the two approaches solve different problems. Licensed radio builds a world; original score drives a narrative. Through the 3D era the studio only needed the first; from V onward, the cinematic ambition of the storytelling required the second; RDR2 proved Rockstar could compose at the scale of a major film studio. GTA VI will be the first title where both capabilities are deployed at maximum intensity simultaneously — Florida-coded radio curation for the world, cinematic original composition for the Lucia/Jason beats. The interesting question is no longer whether Rockstar can do both, but whether the seam between them remains audible.
Wikipedia (2025a) Music of Grand Theft Auto V. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Grand_Theft_Auto_V (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025b) Music of Red Dead Redemption 2. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Music_of_Red_Dead_Redemption_2 (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025c) Grand Theft Auto V. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_V (Accessed: 14 May 2026).
Wikipedia (2025d) Grand Theft Auto VI. Available at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_VI (Accessed: 14 May 2026).