Every Song in the GTA 6 Trailers (and What They Reveal About the Soundtrack)

How Rockstar Picks Trailer Music

Watch enough Rockstar marketing and a thesis emerges: the trailer song is cast, not licensed. GTA V's reveal used Small Faces' “Ogdens' Nut Gone Flake” to telegraph a sun-bleached, period-faithful Los Santos. RDR2's trailers traded in hymnal Americana before “Unshaken” landed as the story's thesis in the final trailer. The song is a character in the pitch.

GTA 6 is now two trailers deep, and the musical pairing is doing unusually deliberate work: two sides of the same decade, two sides of the same relationship.

Trailer 1: Tom Petty — “Love Is a Long Road” (1989)

The choice seemed surprising to people who expected Miami bass or Latin freestyle — the obvious sonic branding for Vice City. Rockstar went the other way: a heartland rock song about a road that does not end well, for a trailer that ends with Lucia walking into a jewelry store with intent.

Three things the pick establishes:

• Tone over geography. The trailer's first half is Florida sunlight; the song keeps it from reading as a vacation. This is a story about people heading somewhere they cannot turn back from — the Petty song is literally about that.
• The time frame is a mood, not a museum. A 1989 track in a modern-set game says the 80s heritage of Vice City is texture, not setting. The game is present-day; the ghosts are period.
• Lucia is the protagonist of the marketing. Trailer 1 is her story lyrically — the road imagery maps to her release and her run.

Trailer 2: The Pointer Sisters — “Hot Together” (1986)

If Petty is the thesis, “Hot Together” is the relationship trailer's opening statement. It is a 1986 single from an album that leans hard into Miami-adjacent R&B production — the Pointer Sisters were already deep into the soundscape Florida radio was playing when the first Vice City generation was in its prime.

The lyric read is unusually on-the-nose for Rockstar: “hot together” is the entire pitch of the Jason-Lucia partnership, the thing the game's tension will test. The choice also completes a decade bracket with Trailer 1 — 1986 and 1989, two ends of the same radio era, two sides of the same couple.

The Pattern: What It Says About the In-Game Soundtrack

Trailer music and game soundtrack are usually different exercises, but the two-song bracket is a strong signal of the tonal palette. My read on what Leonida's radio will actually sound like:

Station lane	Odds it's major	Evidence
80s pop / freestyle	High	Both trailers mine 1986-89; Vice City's musical identity is non-negotiable
Latin / Caribbean	High	Florida setting plus trailer 1's visual Latin-pop references in the nightlife shots
Southern rap / hip-hop	High	Modern Leonida needs its contemporary voice; every GTA since San Andreas has anchored here
Classic rock	Medium	Petty opened the door; the series tradition keeps one at all times
Electronic / updated	Medium	Series standard; the nightlife scenes in trailer 2 show club settings with live DJ framing

One more pattern from the trailers: neither song is diagetic — no scene shows a radio actually playing the track, which for Rockstar means the songs are scoring the promise, not depicting the world. The licensed soundtrack proper will be something else entirely, and when the station list drops, the trailer pair tells you exactly which eras are already in the vault.

The Full Identified Track List (So Far)

• Trailer 1: Tom Petty — “Love Is a Long Road”
• Trailer 2: The Pointer Sisters — “Hot Together”
• Reveal teaser (2023): no licensed music; ambient Florida sound design

For the visual details of the trailer these songs score, see the Trailer 2 frame-by-frame breakdown and the Trailer 1 analysis. We update this page the hour any new trailer or station reveal lands.