GTA 6 radio stations have 18 songs credited across six previews that run 12 minutes 25 seconds, and Rockstar’s own pages don’t say who voices the hosts

Rockstar put six of Grand Theft Auto VI’s radio stations on its Newswire on 8 October, each with on-air hosts and a preview you can play on the game’s site. They are Cocoteo FM, Back Country Radio, AfroBank FM, The Chamber 106.6, Flash FM and Dirty South Classics.

The post names no songs. The player on Rockstar’s Music page does. It carries a label for every stretch of every preview, a title and an artist, and those labels sit in the page’s own data beside the second each one starts. We read that data on 9 October. It credits 18 songs, three to a station.

Then we timed the six audio files from their own metadata. Together they run 12 minutes 25 seconds, and the player labels 7 minutes 31 seconds of that as songs. The rest carries a station’s name and its hosts.

Your own kind of music is the quickest way in. The pads below hold the twelve formats Rockstar listed on X the same day and three kinds of station it named without listing them.

Six stations have names, and Rockstar’s own list points to more

Cocoteo FM plays modern Latin music, from bachata and merengue to dembow and reggaeton, with hosts called El Martillo and La Gata. Back Country Radio is the country station, under MW and Delta Dawne, with a roving reporter called Mud Dog Mike who checks in from an airboat in the Grassrivers. AfroBank FM covers African music from 20th-century classics to amapiano and 3-step, with Burna and Palmsy. The Chamber 106.6 is metal with DJ Kerry and DJ Tom, Flash FM is pop with Robyn and Alex, and Dirty South Classics plays regional rap and hip-hop classics with Trick and Trina.

Rockstar’s wording leaves the door open. The post calls these “six of the stations” and promises “the biggest and widest-ranging selection of in-game radio yet”. It gives no total.

Its post on X the same day goes further than the Newswire does. It lists twelve formats, in this order: Classic Rock, Modern Hip-Hop, Pop, Metal, Dance, Latin, ’80s, Electronic, Blues, Ballads, Talk Radio and Podcasts. Then it adds “and much more”.

Set that list beside the six stations and they only half agree. By our reading, three formats already have a station that bills itself in the same word, which are pop (Flash FM), metal (The Chamber 106.6) and Latin (Cocoteo FM). Three stations play something the list never mentions. Country, African music and Southern rap classics each got one anyway.

Hip-hop is the judgment call. The list says Modern Hip-Hop, and the one rap station named so far calls its music classics. Count that as a miss, leave podcasts out because they aren’t stations, and eight formats on Rockstar’s list still have no station to their name, classic rock, dance, blues and talk radio among them. The only safe tally is at least six stations and no known total.

The preview player credits 18 songs, three to a station

The Newswire post sends readers to the Music section of the game’s site, where every station has a preview. The post lists no songs, and the player does. The bar across the top of a station’s page shows a title and an artist, and all 42 labels behind it, seven for each of the six previews, are in the page’s source. IGN printed the same 18 songs that day, station by station. What we add is the timing.

• Cocoteo FM runs 2:06 and plays “EoO” by Bad Bunny, “Si Es Trucho Es Trucho (Remix)” by Axel Rulay ft. Farruko & El Alfa and “Canalla” by Romeo Santos & El Chaval de la Bachata.
• Back Country Radio runs 1:42 and plays “Need a Little Time Off for Bad Behavior” by David Allan Coe, “Don’t Come Home A-Drinkin’ (With Lovin’ On Your Mind)” by Loretta Lynn and “The Conversation” by Hank Williams, Jr. & Waylon Jennings.
• AfroBank FM runs 1:41 and plays “Joha” by Asake, “Gye Wani” by Pat Thomas ft. Ebo Taylor and “Shay’sana” by DJ Lag & Robot Boii ft. Kamo Mphela.
• The Chamber 106.6 runs 2:16 and plays “I” by Black Sabbath, “I’m Broken” by Pantera and “Raining Blood” by Slayer.
• Flash FM runs 2:15 and plays “Good Ones” by Charli xcx, “Electric Feel” by MGMT and “Midnight Sun (Girls Trip)” by Zara Larsson & PinkPantheress.
• Dirty South Classics runs 2:22 and plays “Like A Pimp” by David Banner ft. Lil’ Flip, “Who Dat” by JT Money ft. Solé and “Born N Raised” by DJ Khaled ft. Trick Daddy, Rick Ross & Pitbull.

Another outlet got there by ear. Game Informer’s Wesley LeBlanc wrote that he “used my phone’s Shazam feature to create a list of all the songs I heard in the previews”. His list and the player’s agree on 17 songs. For the 18th his reads “Like a Pimp Mix - JefeEdai”, where the player credits “Like A Pimp” by David Banner ft. Lil’ Flip.

The previews are short. The longest, Dirty South Classics, runs 2:22 and the shortest, AfroBank FM, runs 1:41. By our arithmetic a song gets about 25 seconds on average. Two get 14 and the longest stretch, 36 seconds, goes to “Midnight Sun (Girls Trip)” by Zara Larsson & PinkPantheress on Flash FM. The six lengths in the list above are in whole seconds, as a player’s clock shows them, and they add to 12:22. The 12:25 total is added from the files’ exact lengths.

One limit applies to all of this. We read the labels and measured the files, and we didn’t listen for what the hosts say. A stretch that carries the station’s name could be talk, a jingle or an advert. We also haven’t played the game.

The famous hosts are named by the press, and two of them have said so themselves

Read Rockstar’s post closely and the hosts are El Martillo and La Gata, MW and Delta Dawne, Burna and Palmsy, DJ Kerry and DJ Tom, Robyn and Alex, Trick and Trina. That’s twelve on-air names plus Mud Dog Mike. Two of them, Robyn and Trina, are also the stage names of the artists said to be behind them. We found no surname and no credit line in the text of the Newswire page, of the radio section of the Music page or of Rockstar’s seven radio posts on X.

The names in the headlines come from the coverage. IGN’s report, published about half an hour after Rockstar’s post on X, repeats the station descriptions with a credit dropped in after each character, as in “El Martillo (voiced by Bad Bunny)”. Its list runs Bad Bunny, RaiNao, Morgan Wallen, Lana Del Rey, Jeremy Dufrene, Burna Boy, Palms Trax, Kerry King, Tom Araya, Robyn, Alex Consani, Trick Daddy and Trina. Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and Miami New Times name the same thirteen people. So does Kotaku, which cites Rolling Stone and Pitchfork.

None of them treats it as a guess. Kotaku calls it “the confirmation of a few famous folks who will be DJing”, announced that day. Miami New Times writes that Rockstar “announced Thursday, Oct. 8, that Miami rap legends Trick Daddy and Trina will host Dirty South Classics”.

IGN and Game Informer both print a line for The Chamber, “classic metal from the ‘80s and beyond”, that isn’t on the Newswire page as we read it. The page says “decades of timeless metal anthems”. Either the press worked from a text of its own or the page was edited after it went up. We can’t tell which.

Two of the thirteen are on the record. Rolling Stone printed Lana Del Rey’s reaction, “On so many different levels this is super special and a privilege”. RaiNao sent Pitchfork a statement. “It feels incredibly special to lend my voice to GTA VI,” she said.

Rockstar has named radio hosts on its Newswire before. When Grand Theft Auto V’s stations got new material in 2014, the Newswire named the DJs outright, Kenny Loggins and Cara Delevingne among them. In 2017 it announced a new station as “hosted by Frank Ocean, Vegyn, Roof Access and Fed”. Those posts named real people outright. The new one gives on-air names and leaves the rest to the press.

The player’s data holds a few clues of its own, with the caution that a song credit is only a song credit. Cocoteo FM’s first song is by Bad Bunny. The Chamber’s last is by Slayer, and Pitchfork and Rolling Stone both identify Kerry King and Tom Araya as members of that band. The last song on Dirty South Classics is a DJ Khaled track that features Trick Daddy.

Morgan Wallen has posted about the game on his own X account, on 17 September, and it was about a song. The post plugs his single from the soundtrack album and doesn’t mention a radio show.

Radio leaves the car, and podcasts arrive

One sentence in the post changes how the series sounds. Rockstar says both radio and a new set of podcasts will play “in vehicles and on foot through newly introduced headphones and earbuds connected to their smartphones”. The smartphones are Jason’s and Lucia’s.

IGN’s report spells out why players care. Radio, it notes, “has previously been confined to your vehicles and inside of select buildings”. Rockstar’s own account of Grand Theft Auto V is consistent with that. In a 2014 Newswire post it quoted Electronic Musician magazine on the game’s score, which “kicks in when a mission starts” and was kept apart from the radio by moments “such as getting out of the car”.

A day before the announcement, headphones had already turned up somewhere else. On 7 October IGN published the full transcript of a demo that Rob Nelson, co-head of Rockstar North, gave it in July. Partway through, looking for something to rob, he says, “So we can go into this place where you buy headphones, for example, and rob it.” He was showing off a stick-up, and he says nothing there about what the headphones are for. Rockstar hasn’t said whether those are the headphones that carry the radio.

Nelson had one more line for radio fans. “There are more radio and in-game TV ads than ever before,” he told IGN. “A lot more.”

The podcasts are the vaguer half. Rockstar calls them “a series of on-demand podcasts” and says they arrive “for the first time ever”, set apart from what it calls Leonida’s terrestrial radio. It hasn’t named a show or a host. The Music page files them with the radio in a single boast, the biggest selection of “in-game radio and podcasts yet”.

Flash FM has been on Vice City’s dial twice before

Five of the six names don’t appear on the station lists Rockstar published in 2013 for the earlier games. The sixth goes back to the first trip to Vice City. That 2013 post puts Flash FM among the seven music stations of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, on a dial it describes as running “from the soul stylings of Fever 105 to the chart-toppers of Flash FM to V-Rock’s headbangers”.

It came back in Vice City Stories, where the same post credits “Flash FM’s pop smashes”. In 2023 Rockstar was still reaching for the name, writing of “the new wave of Vice City’s Flash FM” in a post about its Spotify playlists. Kotaku’s report on the new hosts calls it “a station first featured in the original Vice City”. For Grand Theft Auto VI Rockstar bills it as the Vice City institution and hands it to Robyn and Alex.

The 2013 post is also the nearest thing to a yardstick for the word “biggest”. It lists seven music stations for Vice City, ten for San Andreas and, in Rockstar’s words, “19 unique music stations” across Grand Theft Auto IV and its two episodes. Grand Theft Auto V’s dial kept growing after launch. The 2017 post about Frank Ocean’s station calls it “the first new radio station added to the game since 2015’s The Lab”. Six named stations, six weeks before release, is an opening hand.

The album is a separate record, and none of its eight singles is in the previews

The radio isn’t the only music on the way. Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, made with Atlantic Records, is due on 19 November with 34 original tracks. Six came out as singles on 17 September. Two more followed about 13 hours after the radio announcement, going by the times on Rockstar’s own posts on X. They are “Suzuki” by Fuerza Regida and “Don’t Chart” by Cardi B.

That makes eight singles out and 26 tracks still unnamed. We checked the eight against the 18 songs in the station previews and found no song on both lists. One artist is. PinkPantheress is credited on the single “Sexy Magic” and on “Midnight Sun (Girls Trip)”, which Flash FM’s preview plays. Rockstar hasn’t said whether album tracks will turn up on the in-game stations.

When we first read Rockstar’s Music page on 9 October, seven hours after its post about the two new singles, it still listed six. When we looked again at 16:20 UTC it listed all eight. The two newest had been on Atlantic’s YouTube channel since 03:00 UTC that morning. The upload of “Suzuki” runs 1 minute 52 seconds.

Everything official that names its songs runs to 39 minutes 57 seconds

Add up everything official that credits its songs by name and it runs for less than a lunch break. The six previews run 12:25. The eight singles come to 23:15 by the lengths YouTube gives for Atlantic’s uploads. The two trailers, each of which credits one song in its description, add 4:17. That’s 39 minutes 57 seconds of running time, and 28 songs with a name attached. Rockstar’s Extended Look runs another 26:48 and isn’t in the sum, because its YouTube description credits no song.

The trailer credits are easy to miss. They sit in the YouTube descriptions, where Trailer 1 lists “Love Is A Long Road” by Tom Petty and Trailer 2 lists “Hot Together” by The Pointer Sisters.

Rockstar says there is “more info to come”, including details of the game’s dynamic score and more singles from the album. It has put no date on either. For a sense of what dynamic meant last time, go back to the Electronic Musician piece that Rockstar quoted in 2014. The Alchemist, one of Grand Theft Auto V’s composers, told the magazine, “Each time you play the game, things are going to happen differently.”

The dates that are fixed come from Take-Two. Its pre-order announcement puts pre-loading on 12 November and release on 19 November, on PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S. Until then, the official releases that name their songs fit inside a 40-minute commute, and 26 of the album’s 34 tracks don’t have a name.