GTA VI's Original Score by Justice: Rockstar confirms 11 December and 30 tracks, plus digital bonuses
Rockstar's Newswire post of 29 October 2026 dates Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score by Justice to 11 December 2026, 22 days after the game, with 30 tracks on CD and vinyl plus “a number of digital bonus tracks included across all formats”.
Yes, the score is real — and it is not The Album
Grand Theft Auto VI has two separate records coming, and as of 29 October 2026 both are official. Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score is credited to Justice, the French duo behind the game's mission music, and Rockstar now dates it for 11 December 2026 — 22 days after the game lands on 19 November. The Album, the 34-track Atlantic Records compilation, arrives with the game. Different product, different labels, different track count.
Rockstar's own word: 30 tracks, plus digital bonuses
Rockstar published "Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score by Justice" on the Newswire at 13:00 UTC on 29 October 2026, four hours after Rough Trade opened pre-orders, under the subtitle "Album Coming December 11". The post settles what the shop pages had left open: "the official Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score album features 30 tracks". It then adds the sentence that matters more: "This full album also contains a number of digital bonus tracks included across all formats."
Rockstar puts no figure on those bonuses. Read against the Apple Music catalogue, which lists 50 songs for the same 11 December date, the sentence implies around 20 extra entries the publisher has never numbered. It also explains why the physical editions are sold as 30 songs while the stream runs longer, and why Rockstar calls the bonuses included "across all formats" — wording that suggests vinyl and CD buyers receive them too, as downloads rather than on the discs.
The announcement closed a 14-day gap. Rockstar first named Justice as composer on 15 October 2026, in the launch-trailer cycle reported by Pitchfork and Variety, and promised "more information on Justice's official score album". The date, formats and track counts surfaced through Rough Trade and Apple on the morning of 29 October instead, and Rockstar confirmed them at 14:00 CET — after the retailers, not before.
What the shop pages actually say
Rough Trade opened pre-orders on 29 October 2026 for three physical editions, all dated 11/12/2026 and dispatching between Friday 11 and Saturday 12 December: a 2CD at £14.99, a black 3LP at £44.99 and a 3LP Crystal Clear at £49.99 tagged "Indie Exclusive" with a limit of two per customer. The listing names Because as the label and Justice as the artist.
The same page carries the official description: "Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score by Justice. 30 new songs. Includes 'Flower In A Hurricane' — Feat. Tame Impala, SZA, King Gizzard and the Lizard Wizard and 'Pusher' — Feat. Gesaffelstein. All formats include bonus content." Rough Trade never says what the bonus content is, nor how the 30 songs split across three discs.
Apple Music tells a different story on volume. The iTunes catalogue entry, checked in the New Zealand, French, US and British storefronts on 29 October 2026, lists 50 songs for 11 December 2026, with a rights line reading "℗ 2026 Take-Two Interactive Software, Inc. under exclusive license to Ed Banger Records / Because Music". Ed Banger is Justice's own label; Because handles distribution.
Thirty or fifty: answered, with an ordering problem left over
The two numbers now reconcile in principle: 30 authored tracks on the record, an unstated number of digital bonuses on top, 50 entries in the Apple catalogue. Neither Apple listing — 50 tracks (id 6827656134) and a second at 52 (id 6827706027), both checked on 29 October 2026 — separates the album from the bonuses, and nothing visible in the catalogue on that date did.
The track order raises a smaller contradiction Rockstar's post does not settle. Apple places "Flower in a Hurricane" at position 36 and "Pusher" at 18, while Rockstar names both as tracks of the 30-track album. If the digital edition simply appended 20 bonuses after track 30, an official album track could not sit at 36. Either the streaming sequence interleaves bonus material, or its numbering does not follow the album order. That is arithmetic on published figures, not a statement from Rockstar, and no tracklist has been released to check it against.
Why it costs the same as The Album's vinyl
The pricing is where the score quietly undercuts its sibling. The Album's standard vinyl — two transparent magenta discs — was £44.99 when pre-orders opened on 17 September 2026, its 2CD £10.99. The score's black vinyl is also £44.99 but holds three discs, and its 2CD costs £4 more at £14.99. Per disc, the score is the better deal.
The headline edition is cheaper too. The Album's liquid-filled pressing at £108.99 sold out within hours on 17 September 2026, according to Jeuxvideo.com. The score's most expensive edition is the £49.99 crystal-clear 3LP — roughly 54% less than the collector's vinyl that no longer exists at retail.
Do not add 34 and 50
A tempting sum has been circulating: 34 tracks on The Album plus 50 on the score equals 84 new songs. It double counts, because "Flower in a Hurricane" — track 36 of the score at 3 minutes 44 seconds — is also on the album. The honest ceiling is 83 distinct songs.
Pusher: seven minutes, track 18, out on 29 October
The second named track is the more interesting one. "Pusher", featuring Gesaffelstein, runs 7 minutes 2 seconds according to Apple's metadata, sits at position 18 of 50 — mid-album, not an opener — and came out as a single on 29 October 2026, appearing first in New Zealand at local midnight before rolling west. GTA 6 News reports that Justice and Gesaffelstein produced it, with Xavier de Rosnay, Gaspard Augé and Mike Lévy credited as composers, Eric J Dubowsky mixing and Matt Colton mastering.
Seven minutes is unusual for a trailer-adjacent single and consistent with score work rather than radio material. It is also the first GTA VI music released in the three weeks before launch that was not written for a trailer — "Flower in a Hurricane" accompanied the launch trailer, and "Pusher" carried the "From GTAVI: Original Score" tag on streaming from day one.
"Adaptive", and the Grammy line in the post
Rockstar's description of the music is unusually specific: "Justice bring their signature sound to this adaptive score, featuring expansive compositions all dynamically tuned to the different ways players engage with the world of Vice City and Leonida throughout Jason and Lucia's story." Adaptive is a design term rather than filler — it describes a score built in layers that the game mixes according to what the player is doing, so a cue heard on foot, in a chase or after a failed approach is not the same cue. Rockstar's 15 October reveal already used the phrase "dynamic score"; the Newswire post is the first time the publisher has explained the mechanism in a full sentence.
The other line worth checking is the credit. Rockstar calls Justice "Grammy Award winners", which holds twice: the duo took Best Dance/Electronic Album at the 61st Grammy Awards in 2019 with Woman Worldwide, and Best Remixed Recording, Non-Classical in 2009 for their remix of MGMT's "Electric Feel", per GRAMMY.com. The award is the reason the post leads with the duo's credentials rather than their discography — and the reason the score is being sold as an album, with a campaign, rather than as a soundtrack appendix.
How this compares with GTA V
Rockstar has released a score before, and the scale has changed. The Music of Grand Theft Auto V, Vol. 2: The Score came out on 24 September 2013 with 22 tracks and 78 minutes, composed by Tangerine Dream, Woody Jackson, The Alchemist and Oh No, arranged by DJ Shadow and sold digitally for $9.99. It shipped as the middle volume of a three-part set, with no vinyl campaign of its own.
At 50 tracks the GTA VI score is more than twice the length of GTA V's on streaming — 2.27 times exactly. On physical formats the ratio drops to 1.36 times, since the discs carry 30 songs. Either way, this is the first Grand Theft Auto score given a multi-format physical release with its own retailer exclusives, and the first credited to a single named act.
What Rockstar has now confirmed, and what it still has not said
Confirmed by the publisher on 29 October 2026: a 11 December release; streaming on "all major music streaming services" plus CD and vinyl; 30 tracks; "a number of digital bonus tracks included across all formats"; a "special limited Triple Crystal Clear vinyl"; "Flower in a Hurricane" with Tame Impala, SZA and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard, as heard in the launch trailer; and "Pusher" with Gesaffelstein, released the same day.
Still unstated by Rockstar: how many bonus tracks; the full tracklist; any price in any currency; how 30 tracks divide across a 2CD and two triple-LP configurations; and whether physical buyers get the bonuses as a download code or only the 30 tracks on the discs. Retail data covers all of that, and retail data on this game has been revised before — the 30-song description and the 50-track listing had already coexisted for a day before Rockstar intervened.
That gap explains a wave of headlines. VICE's pre-order piece, published on 29 October 2026, still described a 50-track album taken from Apple; RockstarINTEL headlined the morning that the score had been announced by Rockstar four hours before the Newswire post existed. Readers arriving from either had a different record in mind than the one Rockstar has now described.
The dollar prices, and what one song actually costs
VICE published the US list prices later on 29 October 2026: $21.99 for the 2CD, $54.99 for the black 3LP and $59.99 for the crystal clear 3LP, in a piece by Brent Koepp. The ordering mirrors the UK; the level does not. VICE also confirms that "Pusher" is streaming on Spotify as well as Apple Music, which the shop pages did not state.
RockstarINTEL's own article, published the same morning, adds the packaging detail the retailers leave out: both formats ship in a gatefold sleeve with UV gloss varnish carrying GTA VI artwork. Aaron Trueman's piece also offers the first explanation of the 30-versus-50 gap from any outlet — the discs carry 30 tracks from the game, the streaming version an "extended track list" of 50. Four hours later, Rockstar confirmed the 30 and described the remainder only as "a number of digital bonus tracks": the 50 is Apple's arithmetic, not the publisher's.
Divide the shop prices by the 30 songs the physical editions actually carry and the spread inside a single record becomes visible. The UK 2CD works out at £0.50 a song, the UK black vinyl at £1.50, the crystal clear pressing at £1.67; in dollars, $0.73 for the CD, $1.83 for the black vinyl and $2.00 for the crystal clear. Per song, vinyl costs between 2.5 and 3.3 times the CD depending on the market.
That corrects the per-disc comparison made above, where three discs for the price of two looked like a bargain. Per song, the score's vinyl is the most expensive route to Justice's 30 cues, and the crystal clear edition — the one capped at two copies per customer — is the dearest of all: £1.67 a track, or 3.3 times the UK CD. Buying the vinyl is a decision about the object; it is not a cheaper way to own the music.
Which record is which: 30 instrumentals against 34 songs
Video Games Chronicle's Chris Scullion, publishing at 13:42 UTC on 29 October 2026 — forty-two minutes after Rockstar's Newswire post — drew the distinction the announcement itself leaves implicit. The Justice score, per VGC, "will mainly consist of instrumental tracks", while The Album "contains 34 tracks from a variety of artists", among them Travis Scott, Keith Richards, Morgan Wallen, Rauw Alejandro, PinkPantheress and Yung Lean. Two records with two different jobs: one is the game's score, the other a compilation of songs written for it.
VGC also describes the 30 score tracks as "taken from the band's full suite of material composed for the game" — a selection, not the whole of what Justice wrote. That wording is the cleanest support yet for the gap between the discs and the 50-entry Apple catalogue: the record is a curated 30, the remainder being the digital bonuses Rockstar mentions without numbering.
The division also changes the arithmetic of how much new music GTA VI ships. With the score now confirmed at 30 tracks rather than Apple's 50, the count on physical formats is 30 + 34 − 1 = 63 distinct tracks, because "Flower in a Hurricane" sits on both records. The streaming ceiling of 83 holds on the same logic at 50 + 34 − 1; the 20-track difference between the two figures is exactly the unnumbered bonus material.
Instrumental matters for a second reason. A score built in layers that the game mixes to match what the player is doing — Rockstar's own description of the "adaptive" system — needs cues without lead vocals, since a vocal line cannot be re-entered at an arbitrary point in a chase. The 34 album songs, written as records in their own right, cannot serve that function. The two releases are complementary pieces of the same audio design, not competing versions of one soundtrack.
Three hours of score, and the formats that cannot hold it
Rockstar's own product copy, quoted by IGN's Wesley Yin-Poole on 29 October 2026, puts the first runtime figure on the project: the 2xCD and 3xLP editions "features 30 tracks and a number of bonus digital tracks comprising a 3 hour-long suite of material from the game." Until that sentence, every published figure on this release concerned track counts. This is the first one that concerns duration, and it is the one that explains the structure of the whole product.
Three hours is 180 minutes, and that total sits outside what the formats Rockstar is selling can physically carry. A standard CD holds 80 minutes, so the double CD tops out at 160 — twenty minutes short of the suite. A 12-inch LP cut at 33⅓ rpm carries roughly 22 minutes a side of loud, bass-heavy electronic music before the level has to come down; six sides give about 132 minutes, and reaching 180 would need 30 minutes a side, which is where the grooves get shallow and the bass suffers.
The "bonus digital tracks" sentence is therefore a constraint as much as a perk. On those assumptions, between 30 and 48 minutes of the suite — 17% to 27% of it — exists only as a download, whatever the buyer paid for the plastic. Rockstar has never presented the digital edition as an afterthought: Apple's catalogue lists 50 entries, Rockstar's own copy calls the whole thing a 3 hour-long suite, and the discs carry the 30 tracks that fit.
What three hours means per track
Divide the suite by its streaming length and the arithmetic lands somewhere useful. Apple's catalogue lists 50 entries for 11 December 2026; 180 minutes spread across 50 tracks averages 3 minutes 36 seconds. GTA V's second volume — 22 tracks, 78 minutes, released on 24 September 2013 — averaged 3 minutes 33 seconds. Thirteen years apart, the average Justice cue runs three seconds longer than the average cue by Tangerine Dream, Woody Jackson, The Alchemist and Oh No.
So the growth is in quantity, not in density: 180 minutes against 78 is 2.31 times the GTA V score at the same average track length. Reading the 3 hours as the 30 physical tracks instead would give 6 minutes a cue, 1.69 times the 2013 average — but that is precisely the reading the disc capacity rules out. RockstarINTEL's Aaron Trueman, writing on 29 October 2026, picks the coherent one: 30 tracks on the discs, an "extended track list" of 50 on streaming.
Xavier de Rosnay gives the reason for the volume in the same IGN piece: "The scope of the game is so large geographically and thematically that it was clear from the beginning the music would also have to be very broad in terms of emotions, genres, and textures. We were given the freedom to explore as many things as we needed to, musically speaking." Three hours is what that freedom produces when a score has to follow two protagonists across a state.
The streaming catalogue still knows nothing
Apple's public lookup API makes the point bluntly. Queried on 29 October 2026, the album's 50 entries are titled "Track 1" through "Track 50" and carry no duration field at all. The single exception is "Pusher [From GTAVI: Original Score]", at position 18, with a running time of 422,702 milliseconds — 7 minutes 2 seconds, and 3.9% of the 180-minute suite on its own.
That absence matters for anyone quoting a tracklist. The 50 entries are placeholders, not a sequence: Apple knows how many tracks will be delivered and has no idea what they are called, which is why the position 36 occupied by "Flower in a Hurricane" in earlier listings cannot be read as album order. Rockstar's "Pusher" copy, as carried by IGN, is the only description of the track's function so far — "a preview of the instrumental side of the score" and the duo's first collaboration with Gesaffelstein.
The euro prices: €16.99, €40.99 and €44.99
Rockstar Actu's Julien Rémi published the French list prices on 29 October 2026, and they are the first euro figures attached to this release — Rough Trade had given pounds and VICE dollars, neither of which tells a European buyer what the record costs in a shop. The 2CD is €16.99 in a six-page digisleeve, the standard black 3LP is €40.99, and the limited Crystal Clear 3LP is €44.99, all in a gatefold sleeve with UV gloss varnish and bonus content.
Divided by the 30 tracks the discs carry, that is €0.57 a song for the CD, €1.37 for the black vinyl and €1.50 for the crystal clear — the same ordering as Britain, where the identical three editions work out at £0.50, £1.50 and £1.67. The deluxe surcharge is flat in cash and not in percentage: +€4.00 in the euro zone (9.76%), +£5.00 in Britain (11.11%) and +$5.00 in the United States (9.09%), which makes the American buyer the one who pays least, proportionally, for the coloured pressing.
One ratio needs no exchange rate at all, which is why it is worth stating plainly. The 2CD costs 33.3% of the black 3LP in Britain, 40.0% in the United States and 41.5% in the euro zone: the CD is proportionally dearest where the vinyl is cheapest. On face value, the American black 3LP at $54.99 sits 34.2% above the euro price of €40.99, and no conversion has been applied — so that last comparison is a list-price observation, not a currency claim.
A caveat French coverage raises, and a second confirmation
Rockstar Actu adds a distinction the English-language pieces blur. The Newswire is explicit about "digital bonus tracks", but the shop listings promise "bonus content" without ever saying what it is; Rémi notes it could be extra music or physical extras such as a poster, and nothing in the retail copy settles the point. That matters for the arithmetic above: the 30-to-50 reading of this release rests on Rockstar's own wording, not on the retailers'.
The same piece corroborates the runtime from a second direction. Rémi reports "environ trois heures" for the full album while citing Justice's own official store — until then, the 3-hour figure came only from Rockstar's product copy as quoted by IGN. Two independent publishers of the same number, one of them the artist's own shop, is the strongest form the figure has taken, and it is what makes the disc-capacity argument hold rather than suggest.
One instant, not a staggered midnight: the album's unlock hour
Apple's catalogue is the only public source that fixes the score to a clock rather than a date. Queried on 30 October 2026, the iTunes lookup API returns 2026-12-11T08:00:00Z as the collection's release timestamp in both the British and French storefronts — 09:00 in Paris, 08:00 in London, 03:00 in New York and exactly 00:00 in Los Angeles. Rockstar's Newswire gives the day and never the hour.
That single instant separates the album from the game it accompanies. GTA VI is expected to unlock at local midnight territory by territory, the assumption behind our guide to the staggered midnight launch and the New Zealand storefront trick; "Pusher" itself arrived that way on 29 October 2026, first in New Zealand at local midnight and then westward. At 08:00 UTC on 11 December, Auckland reads 21:00 the same day and Los Angeles reads 00:00 — the same moment, 21 hours apart on the wall clock.
One caveat keeps this from being a promise. A timestamp set by the label inside a catalogue is not a regional rollout plan: Apple knows when its own album page opens, not how Rockstar will stage the release, and no retailer publishes a shipping hour. What is verifiable today is the date in Rockstar's own copy, 11 December 2026, and the hour in Apple's — 08:00 UTC, which for a European reader is 09:00 on Friday 11 December.
