📰 News 2026-09-17 · GTA VI News editorial team · GTA VI News 🔄 Updated 2026-10-31

GTA VI: The Album is official — 34 original tracks, six out now, and vinyl you can pre-order today

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The short answer

GTA VI is getting a real record, not a playlist. Rockstar Games and Atlantic Records confirmed Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album on September 17: 34 brand-new, original tracks, released on November 19 — the same day the game arrives on PS5 and Xbox Series X|S. Six of those songs are streaming from today, and the vinyl and CD versions went on pre-order the same afternoon.

The six songs you can hear now

The first batch of singles, with their positions on the tracklist as catalogued by RockstarINTEL:

• Track 2 — Yung Lean, "That's It" (feat. Future & Metro Boomin)
• Track 4 — Travis Scott, "RHYNO" (produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo)
• Track 5 — CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso, PinkPantheress, Fred again.. and Étienne de Crécy, "Sexy Magic"
• Track 8 — Morgan Wallen, "Last Thing You Need"
• Track 11 — Rauw Alejandro, "Macacoa 2000"
• Track 32 — Keith Richards, "Bright Lights, Big City"

The remaining 28 tracks have not been named. The album can be pre-saved now on Spotify, Apple Music, YouTube Music, Deezer, Tidal and Amazon Music (VGC). Atlantic co-produces the project with Rockstar (Billboard), and the publisher is promising more to come: details about "the dynamic score, the next evolution of in-game radio, and more" are on the way (RockstarINTEL).

Three editions, one of them filled with liquid

The physical release comes in three shapes, priced on Rockstar's own store (VGC; RockstarINTEL):

• CD — £10.99: the album on two discs with a booklet in a jewel case.
• Vinyl — £44.99: two transparent magenta discs with a blue splatter.
• Limited-edition vinyl — £108.99: two transparent magenta discs filled with blue liquid, plus exclusive artwork and packaging, produced in limited quantities.

Those tiers translate to $19.98, $49.98 and $124.98 on the album's official store, figures that match almost exactly what Dealabs' billbil-kun leaked minutes before Rockstar's own announcement (gtavi-thealbum.com; IGN).

Beyond the three Atlantic exclusives, Rockstar has lined up retail-only pressings, each with its own disc colourway and artwork, at Blood Records, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Urban Outfitters and independent record shops (RockstarINTEL; Billboard).

The second wave: posters, disc colourways, and fresh Jason & Lucia art

The announcement came with a full artwork drop. RockstarINTEL gathered the complete set published by Rockstar, the album's own store and every retailer carrying an exclusive variant: several new Jason and Lucia illustrations — one of them an artistic reworking of the closing shot of the first trailer — plus animated versions of the visuals that ran on Spotify and on the artists' own accounts to push the six streaming tracks.

Each pressing also gets its own discs and poster, as catalogued by Rockstar Actu:

• Collector's edition (€123.99 / £108.99): two translucent purple records with a pink droplet effect, a limited run with no stated quantity, and an exclusive 12×24-inch print.
• Standard vinyl (€51.99 / £44.99): same purple base, a different droplet pattern, and a poster showing Jason and Lucia rather than the Rockstar logo print found in the collector box.
• CD (€16.99 / £10.99): two discs, no poster.

The retail variants go further than a colour swap: Blood Records, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Urban Outfitters, HMV and independent shops each get a different sleeve cover and a different poster artwork, which is why the same album can be bought half a dozen times over with no two packages looking alike.

A physical album for a game that ships without a disc

There is a useful irony in the announcement. GTA VI's boxed editions will not contain a game disc — buyers get a download code instead (VGC). The soundtrack, meanwhile, gets a double-LP, a limited run and a retail exclusive campaign. GameSpot's headline makes the joke for everyone: the album gets a physical release, even though the game does not.

PlayStation has since put a date on that shift: the platform holder confirmed on July 1 that it will stop producing discs for new games released on its consoles from January 2028, leaving digital distribution as the default path to market (PlayStation Blog; IGN). Man of Many is the outlet that lines the two facts up side by side — GTA VI's box will contain no disc, while the soundtrack attached to it gets a double LP, a limited collector's pressing filled with liquid and retailer exclusives in eight chains.

Compare with 2013. GTA V's music arrived as a licensed collection around launch and its radio stations stayed a mystery until players started driving; only later did the GTA V and Red Dead Redemption 2 soundtracks get their own vinyl pressings (RockstarINTEL). This time the music is a product in its own right, co-released by a major label, announced with nine weeks still to go.

The three-day tease, explained

The rollout that began on September 15 — musicians posting Vice City-style artwork, then Spotify-branded billboards in Los Angeles, New York and Miami — now reads backwards as the setup for this. Every artist who published one of those images turns out to be on one of the six tracks released today, which is what the posts were promoting all along (VGC). Rockstar has not said how the album connects to the in-game radio stations, and won't until the promised follow-up.

Update — the collector's pressing sells out in hours

The £108.99 edition did not survive the afternoon. Within a few hours of pre-orders opening on September 17, Jeuxvideo.com reported that the limited-edition vinyl — the one whose discs are filled with blue liquid — was already sold out on the album's official store: the tier Rockstar had described as produced in limited quantities (Jeuxvideo.com).

The retail campaign kept growing around it. Jeuxvideo.com also flags two special vinyl editions reserved for FNAC in France, a channel that usually undercuts the official store on this kind of release, while iGrandTheftAuto spotted an Amazon UK exclusive pressing — one that carries no unseen artwork and did not appear to be orderable when it was found (Jeuxvideo.com; iGrandTheftAuto).

One more physical detail came with the storefront listings: the standard retail CD, pictured as a two-disc jewel case, may be exclusive to the official GTA VI Album Store, which would leave the vinyl variants as the collectible end of the range (iGrandTheftAuto).

None of this changes the substance of the announcement — 34 original tracks, November 19, six songs streaming now — but it does date the first day of the campaign: the most expensive version is the one that ran out first.

Update — the album costs more than the game

One comparison has been doing the rounds in the French press as the pre-order pages filled up, and it is the clearest sign of what the physical campaign has become: the collector's vinyl costs more than the most expensive version of the game itself. The £108.99 / €123.99 / $124.98 pressing sits above the Ultimate Edition at $99.99 — and well above the $79.99 standard release — for an album that will also be streaming on every service the same day (Jeux.ca).

The rest of the evening was retail logistics. Outlets on both sides of the Atlantic published buying guides for the variants — which sleeve belongs to which shop, which disc colourway is exclusive to whom — after Rockstar opened pre-orders with a campaign built on store exclusives rather than a single edition. In France, those guides arrived alongside the FNAC editions JV.com had already flagged, and in the US the same exercise covered Best Buy, Walmart, Target, Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Urban Outfitters.

None of it changes the substance: 34 original tracks on November 19, six singles out now. It does show where the campaign's energy went next. On a day when Take-Two's shareholders were told GTA VI remains a single-player experience, the most-ordered product in the franchise was a record.

Update — sold out in minutes, then resold at close to triple price

The £108.99 pressing cleared in minutes, and by mid-afternoon copies were being offered on eBay for close to three times what they cost. GAMINGbible catalogued listings at £312.70, £313.87 and £385.57, posted by sellers in the UK, Italy and the United States — with one caveat attached to every one of them: the photographs were placeholders, because nobody can have the record in hand before release day (GAMINGbible). Orders placed with Rockstar's store ship from November 20, the day after the album arrives, which is what makes a two-month-long resale market possible on a product that does not exist yet (Insider Gaming).

The rest of the range stayed open, and that is the useful part for anyone who missed the collectors' edition. The standard vinyl keeps the same transparent magenta base with a blue splatter for £44.99 / €51.99, and the CD — two discs and a booklet in a jewel case — sits at £10.99 / €16.99 (GAMINGbible; Insider Gaming). What the limited edition actually adds is the liquid sealed inside the discs and a different sleeve: the same music, for roughly two and a half times the money.

In France, the offers that opened alongside the official store fill in the rest of that ladder. FNAC lists four references: the CD at €15.99 with a 16-page booklet, the standard vinyl at €39.99 with a 12×24-inch poster, and two FNAC-exclusive pressings at €40.99 — one on light pink and light blue discs, the other on marbled pink-and-white and blue-and-white discs, both with the same poster. Cultura sells the CD at €16.99 and a vinyl at €33.99 (GTA6France). The full spread therefore runs from about €16 to €123.99 for the liquid-filled collector, which is a wide enough range to explain why the top of it went first — and why it came straight back with a markup.

Update — the singles are out, and the lyrics are already being read

The six tracks went live on streaming on September 17, and the music press treated them as records in their own right rather than as a game tie-in. The most picked-apart is Travis Scott's "RHYNO", produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo: iHeart quotes the line "Take time, throwin' C-notes, hittin' high notes / Jack of Hearts, bae, I don't wanna break mine" — a direct nod to Jack of Hearts, the Crosstown strip club owned by Boobie Ike that has appeared in both of the game's trailers. HotNewHipHop's first-listen calls it "not your usual Travis song", carried by a heavier beat than his recent solo output, and notes Scott's music had already been licensed to GTA V and GTA Online years before this.

The rest of the batch was filed by genre. Hip-hop outlets led on "That's It", the Yung Lean track with Future and Metro Boomin, described by iHeart as bass-heavy; Latin music press led on "Macacoa 2000" and "Sexy Magic", with Remezcla framing the album as a bilingual affair — Rauw Alejandro and CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso sitting inside an otherwise English-language bill.

None of it added a name to the tracklist. The album still stands at 34 original tracks — six released, 28 still unnamed — and both iHeart and Official Charts, which keeps a running list of confirmed contributors, say more artists are expected to be announced before November 19.

Update — the missing disc becomes a national story

The album has now crossed out of the gaming press, and the BBC picked it up for the reason that keeps coming back: Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album gets a CD and two vinyl pressings on November 19, while the game it accompanies will not ship on a disc at all — boxed copies carry a download code instead (BBC). The corporation framed the announcement as having "reignited a debate" over that decision, and noted that not all fans greeted the album reveal warmly — an argument that had until now stayed inside forums and comment threads.

Rockstar has not responded to the framing, and nothing about the release itself has moved. What did move is the audience: on the same afternoon the story reached general-news desks, the specialist outlets were doing the practical work — IGN, Polygon, Mashable, Push Square and VICE all published pre-order guides breaking down the three official editions and the retailer exclusives (IGN; Polygon; VICE). That is the commercial milestone worth keeping: the record is now explained, priced and sold in public, in the same week it was announced, on a campaign built around scarcity rather than a single SKU.

For anyone catching up: 34 original tracks, six already streaming, released November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games).

Update — the two-year build: how Atlantic ended up making a GTA record

The album did not appear out of nowhere. Kevin Weaver, president of Atlantic Music Group, has said his team has been working with Rockstar Games on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album for the past two years — which puts the first conversations about the record somewhere in 2024, well before the game's release date slipped twice and before the public had seen anything beyond the opening trailers (r/GTA6).

Weaver is not a soundtrack hobbyist, and that is the part that explains the announcement's shape. He joined Atlantic in 1994, went on to run its film and television division, was appointed President, West Coast in 2017, and in January was promoted into the newly created role of President, Atlantic Music Group — a job whose stated remit is "soundtracks, strategic partnerships and gaming initiatives, sync licensing, and brand alignments" across Atlantic Records, 300 Entertainment and 10K Projects (Music Business Worldwide; Warner Music Group). His credits include Barbie The Album, Twisters The Album, The Greatest Showman, Suicide Squad The Album and F1 The Album, and Atlantic says the projects he has produced or overseen account for more than 50 million album-equivalent units and 65 billion audio and video streams (Music Business Worldwide).

That is the template GTA VI has now been dropped into. Albums attached to films have been built for years as standalone commercial objects with their own roster, singles and vinyl campaigns — Barbie being the most recent clear case — and this record has been given the same treatment, with six singles seeded to streaming nine weeks before release while the game itself gets no disc.

It is also not Rockstar's first move into the record business. In 2021 the studio launched CircoLoco Records with the Ibiza promoter of the same name, a label built around the dance music that had been flowing through GTA Online. Sam Houser gave the logic himself at the time: "Music is fundamental to Rockstar Games – it's part of everything we do." Houser's own career began in the music industry, in BMG's UK post-room in 1990, and by 1996 he was head of development at BMG Interactive — the company that sold GTA, and the studio with it, to Take-Two Interactive in March 1998 (Music Business Worldwide).

For scale, that is the audience the record is aimed at: Rockstar says GTA V has sold in more than 230 million units and the series close to 475 million (Music Business Worldwide).

None of it settles the question players actually ask. The 34 tracks are confirmed as a separate, saleable object with 28 songs still unnamed, and the details Rockstar promised about "the dynamic score" and "the next evolution of in-game radio" have still not arrived.

Update — the six singles also exist as official videos

The six tracks seeded to streaming on September 17 did not stop at the streaming services: each one has its own upload on Atlantic Records' official YouTube channel, published the same day the album was announced — six separate clips rather than one album teaser, matching the scale of the six singles that went out to streaming (Atlantic Records).

The clip the music press has picked apart most is Travis Scott's "RHYNO", produced by Guy-Manuel de Homem-Christo and already dissected for its Jack of Hearts line.

The five companions sit on the same channel, each with its own artwork: Yung Lean's "That's It" with Future and Metro Boomin, Rauw Alejandro's "Macacoa 2000", Morgan Wallen's "Last Thing You Need", Keith Richards' "Bright Lights, Big City" and the "Sexy Magic" team-up between CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso, PinkPantheress and Fred again.. (Atlantic Records). There is still no video for the album as a whole, and nothing new has been added to the tracklist: 34 original tracks, 28 of them still unnamed.

Update — the Keith Richards track is a Jimmy Reed cover

Not everything on the album is a new composition. "Bright Lights, Big City", one of the six songs already streaming, is a cover of the blues single Jimmy Reed put out in 1961: Richards keeps the arrangement minimal — drums and a straight blues riff — and sings it in the weathered voice the track has been reviewed for. It also counts as his first solo release in two years (Ultimate Classic Rock; Rolling Stone; Blues Actu).

Richards has admired Reed for decades and calls him a genius: "He was totally unique amongst even all of the other 1950s and '60s bluesmen out of Chicago. He has such a distinctive sound. […] There are thousands and thousands of Blues players out there and to find a unique sound and a way to play it is an extra touch of genius. Jimmy Reed had it."

The five other singles remain originals written for the project. One clarification is worth holding on to, now that the record is being read as a portrait of the game's music: the album does not collect every track used in GTA VI. It packs 34 songs written for it, and neither Atlantic nor Rockstar has published a complete tracklist — for the album or for the rest of the game's music (MusicRadar).

Update — September 18: Target's pressing comes with a poster the others don't have

The US retailer Target has put its edition of the album online, and its own description spells out what the other chains left implicit: "Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album on half pink / half blue vinyl. The 2LP, gatefold jacket includes a Target exclusive 12x24 poster." The page lists exactly two exclusives — the half pink, half blue double LP and the poster — with the same 34 tracks as every other pressing (Target).

What the community added the same day is the subject of that poster. Threads on r/GTA6 and the accounts that catalogue the retail variants reported that the Target art shows a new Jason illustration, a claim relayed on September 18 by @GTAonlineNews on X and by the GTA site PLANET GTA6 — the latter flagging it as reported rather than announced.

That caution is warranted. Rockstar's Newswire only ever promised "exclusive vinyl colourways, each featuring a new artwork" at Blood Records, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Urban Outfitters and independent record shops, and the accompanying press release mentions a poster with each retailer exclusivity — without publishing the designs or saying which protagonist appears where. No Rockstar communication names a Jason poster for Target, and the artwork itself has not been released. Until one does, the only claim the evidence supports is the narrower one: a Target-only 12×24 poster exists, and its subject comes from product photography.

It is the second time in this rollout that a retailer listing has carried information the publisher did not announce. The first was the spread of disc colourways itself, reconstructed by fans and by RockstarINTEL from store pages rather than from the Newswire, which is why the full map of ten pressings — sleeves, discs and posters — is still being assembled piece by piece.

Update — September 19: the final retail design, and the artwork in higher resolution

The last of the retailer designs has surfaced. Target's page had already confirmed the mechanics — a half pink / half blue 2LP in a gatefold jacket, with a 12×24-inch poster no other chain gets (Target) — but it was iGrandTheftAuto that closed the set on September 18, calling the Target pressing "the final remaining design to be unveiled" and relaying the poster's subject: a new Jason illustration (iGrandTheftAuto).

A day later the same account published a higher-resolution, lightly retouched version of that artwork, with a note that Rockstar has still not released the full image itself. The caveat from the previous day stands: the Newswire promises "exclusive vinyl colourways, each featuring a new artwork" without ever naming which protagonist appears where, so every identification so far rests on product photography and on fans stitching the pieces together (iGrandTheftAuto; RockstarINTEL).

One more piece of the map moved at the same time. An iMusic-exclusive clear pressing has appeared online, and iGrandTheftAuto reports that edition ships with a poster built on Dazed's artwork, with a French version listed for Fnac (iMusic; iGrandTheftAuto). Dazed is the magazine that gave the two protagonists their first print appearance — the same issue whose stickers RockstarINTEL documented earlier in September. The outlet has also published a gallery of all the new artwork and the pressings themselves, which is how the retail map has been assembled from the start: from store pages and community screenshots, not from an announcement.

Update — September 19: 4.1 million streams in 24 hours

The six singles finally have numbers attached to them. Figures published by Spotify on September 18 — and relayed on September 19 by iGrandTheftAuto — put the first batch (Yung Lean's "That's It", Travis Scott's "RHYNO", "Sexy Magic", Morgan Wallen's "Last Thing You Need", Rauw Alejandro's "Macacoa 2000" and Keith Richards' "Bright Lights, Big City") at 4.1 million global Spotify streams in their first 24 hours (The Music Universe; iGrandTheftAuto).

The rest of the day-one data says as much about the campaign as about the songs:

• Morgan Wallen charts highest. "Last Thing You Need" entered Spotify's US Daily Chart at No. 23 — the best-placed of the six tracks.
• Artist pages surged. Keith Richards' page views rose 1,200% on release day, ahead of Morgan Wallen (168%), Rauw Alejandro (96%) and Travis Scott (93%), with Scott drawing the largest audience of the group overall.
• The playlist moved more than the tracks. The Grand Theft Auto Official Playlist posted a rise of close to 40,000% compared with the day before the singles landed.
• Search demand. Searches for "GTA VI" ran 3,042% above their average that day; "GTA" was up 950%.
• Playlists and shares. More than 250,000 user playlists added at least one of the six songs, over 2,000 new GTA VI-themed playlists were created, and the tracks passed 137,000 shares, with "RHYNO" the most shared of the six.

The geographic spread is the part that reads like a game launch rather than a record release: the United States topped the playlist's streaming countries, followed by Brazil, Mexico, the United Kingdom and Germany (The Music Universe). Spotify pushed the release with outdoor billboards in New York, Los Angeles, Miami, London and Mexico City promoting the album's pre-save — the same campaign the artists' artwork drop had been building towards.

Two things are worth keeping separate here. The 4.1 million covers six brand-new songs, not catalogue tracks, which makes it a different exercise from the Extended Look effect — when music released years earlier suddenly climbed, with Captain & Tennille's 1977 ballad up 130,730% in global streams and average monthly-listener growth of 670% across the artists involved. And none of it moves the album's state: 34 original tracks, 28 of them still unnamed, released November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games).

Update — September 19: an unfinished track leaks, and a tracklist rumour follows

The album is now being followed the same way the game has been for four years: through leaks. On September 18, an unfinished version of a song recorded for Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album appeared online — a track featuring Kodak Black and Don Toliver, flagged by the account TexFunz2 and relayed the same evening by @GTASixInfo, which describes it as "an early version… likely from 2 years ago when the album started development" (GTASixInfo; iGrandTheftAuto).

That dating is the interesting part. Kevin Weaver, the Atlantic president who produced the record, has said his team has been working on it for two years — which puts the leak almost exactly on the moment the project started, and is also what makes it impossible to verify. Rockstar has not commented, the song is not one of the six released singles, and nothing has been added to the official listing: 34 tracks, six named.

A day later a French outlet went further. EGW.News published a story on September 19 saying the complete tracklist of The Album had reportedly leaked as well. No other outlet has produced a 34-title list, Rockstar has confirmed nothing, and the only songs the publisher has named remain the six singles — so, as it stands, that claim is unverified and the other 28 titles are still officially unnamed (EGW.News).

What can be checked is what the six released songs actually say. iGrandTheftAuto's reading of the batch is that the lyrics circle the subjects the game itself does — crime, money, relationships and nightlife — with Rauw Alejandro's "Macacoa 2000" built on a pun on Lucia Caminos's name: "Ella está lucía', to' los camino' conducen" (iGrandTheftAuto; gta.com.ua). Travis Scott's "RHYNO" line about Jack of Hearts had already done the same job for the Crosstown strip club.

So the rollout sits exactly where it did three days ago: 34 original tracks, 28 of them unnamed, out on November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games). What has changed is the shadow around it — the album now has a bootleg, a rumour of a full tracklist, and the same leak economy that has followed GTA VI since 2022.

Update — September 20: the album is already charting, two months before it comes out

A record that does not exist yet is already on the album charts. Since September 18, Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album has sat inside Apple Music's Top 100 albums in 29 countries, with a best position of No. 13 in Switzerland, ahead of Germany and Poland (14), the Netherlands (21), Brazil (23), the United States (29), France and Canada (38), the United Kingdom (63) and Chile (74), according to the chart tracker ChartStats.

The mechanism is worth spelling out, because it explains an otherwise strange line in the data. The six singles are published under the album's own entry, so every play of "RHYNO" or "That's It" counts as consumption of the album, and pre-saves on Apple Music register as well. What the 29 markets measure is therefore appetite rather than sales — but no Grand Theft Auto soundtrack has ever produced that, and the game's release date is still two months away.

The per-track detail sharpens it further. Kworb's Spotify chart history for the album credits "Last Thing You Need" with 2,150,343 streams and "RHYNO" with 1,590,685 as of September 18, against 99,915 for "Macacoa 2000", 52,729 for "That's It" and 3,947 for "Sexy Magic". In other words, Morgan Wallen and Travis Scott account for close to nine tenths of the 4.1 million streams the six singles collected in their first 24 hours, while the Latin and Swedish entries of the batch are still being discovered.

The announcement itself travelled well past the games press. Music-business outlets covered it as a label event — Digital Music News ran it under the headline "Atlantic/WMG Floors It" — general-news desks filed their own versions at NBC New York and Bleacher Report, and Complex headlined the album with Travis Scott attached to it, the same outlet that had read the September 15 artwork drop as a radio-station tease. None of that moved the substance: 34 original tracks, six released, 28 unnamed, out on November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games).

Update — September 20: still orderable, just not on your storefront

Three days on, the album has stopped being a games story. Entertainment Focus, The Magic Rain, UPI, IBTimes and a string of general-news desks filed their own explainers on September 19 and 20, and each one repeats the same three facts — 34 tracks, November 19, six songs out now (Entertainment Focus; The Magic Rain). Not one of them adds a detail Rockstar has not already published.

What is worth doing instead of re-reading the announcement is checking what is genuinely still purchasable at list price. The official store's own product feed, read directly on September 20, lists all three editions as available: the CD at $19.98, the standard vinyl at $49.98 and the limited edition at $124.98 — the liquid-filled pressing that headlines declared sold out within the hour (gtavi-thealbum.com).

Both statements are true, and the reason is geography. The sellout was per storefront, not global: on September 17 the £108.99 UK and €123.99 EU pages went out of stock while the same product stayed on sale on the dollar listing, which is why a European buyer got the "sold out" screen where an American one still saw a pre-order button (GTA Intel; nowplaying.cool). Anyone who gave up on day one on the strength of the headline never checked the page that still had stock.

Three other details settled in the same period:

• The retail map is larger than ten. NME counted eleven vinyl variants and two CD editions on September 18, spread across the official store plus Blood Records, Best Buy, Walmart, Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Target, Urban Outfitters, HMV, iMusic and independent shops — the two magenta pressings (liquid and splatter) being the only official-store exclusives (NME).
• Some of those pressings are dated November 20, not 19. iMusic's exclusive clear pink and clear blue edition is listed as released on November 20, matching the November 20 ship date on the official store, while Blood Records aims to ship "on, or close to" November 19 (iMusic; Blood Records). The music's street date is November 19; the parcels mostly are not.
• The resale market has a range, not a price. NME's count on September 18 was more than a dozen eBay listings between £220 and £490, with completed sales between £215 and £315, against a £108.99 retail price (NME).

None of it moves the substance. Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album is 34 original tracks, six of them streaming since September 17 and 28 still unnamed, out on November 19 alongside the game — with the dynamic score and the in-game radio details still unannounced (Rockstar Games).

Update — September 20: the dollar side of the market, and a $550 bundle

The £220–£490 spread NME logged is the British half of the picture. In dollars, TheGamer's scan of eBay on September 18 put the limited edition at $345 as its opening benchmark, with a cluster of comparable listings sitting between $300 and $350 — against a $124.98 retail price, the same near-threefold multiple measured in pounds (TheGamer).

The listings that date this market best are the ones bundling hardware. Sellers were pairing the liquid-filled record with the limited-edition DualSense controller for $550 — a package that could not have been assembled a month ago, because neither product existed (TheGamer; the DualSense story).

Two more points from the same scan are worth keeping. The markup is not confined to the collector's edition: Walmart and Amazon store exclusives, which never sold out, were already being flipped at $100 to $130, roughly double what the shops behind them charged. And the ceiling has a precedent — GTA V's own vinyl pressings, released years after the game, carry listings approaching $1,000, which is where a scarce GTA record has historically ended up (TheGamer).

The practical conclusion is unchanged. The version that sold out is the one with liquid sealed inside the discs and a different sleeve; the standard vinyl at $49.98 and the CD at $19.98 were still on Rockstar's own store at list price on September 20 (gtavi-thealbum.com).

Update — September 21: the pre-sale peak was three days ago

The album's first chart run has turned. Three days after the singles went live, Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album is on Apple Music's Top 100 in 27 countries — fewer than the 29 it had reached — and its best position, No. 13 in Switzerland, was first recorded on September 19 and has not been matched since. ChartStats' country-by-country history, read on September 21, shows the movement market by market:

• Germany — No. 85 → No. 14 → No. 16 → No. 29
• United States — No. 69 → No. 29 → No. 30 → No. 33
• Switzerland — No. 13 → No. 19 → No. 34
• Sweden — No. 64 → No. 18 → No. 17 → No. 26
• Poland — No. 46 → No. 14 → No. 14 → No. 17 (still the best placing the album holds anywhere today)
• United Kingdom — No. 63 → No. 88

Two of the markets it had entered have already fallen off the chart entirely, and the 29-country figure quoted earlier in this article describes September 20, not a trend. The mechanism behind the whole run is the one flagged at the time: because the six singles are filed under the album's own entry and Apple Music counts pre-saves, the record racked up an album chart position that no physical copy has earned yet — nothing ships before November 19, and nothing can lift it again until Rockstar names more of the 28 songs it has not revealed or opens a new part of the campaign (ChartStats).

The other September 21 development on this story is that there was none. The announcement kept circulating through general-news desks — CNBC TV18 republished the six-track rundown, music outlet Texx and the City led with the artist list, and the same syndicated wire copy was filed by a string of US local-radio news sites, from KTNN in St. Michaels, Arizona, to KFDI, Dailyfly, KDKD and Big Country News Connection, each of them running it under the headline about Travis Scott, Morgan Wallen and Keith Richards — but every one of those pieces repeats the same three facts published on September 17: 34 original tracks, six singles out now, November 19 (CNBC TV18; Texx and the City; KTNN).

So the state of play is unchanged on the product and changed on the data: 34 original tracks, six streaming, 27 markets still charting, and a record that has just made the descent any release makes after its opening spike — two months before it can actually be bought.

Update — September 21: what the trackers now file as confirmed — and what they do not

The music story closed the week with a useful piece of housekeeping from the outlets tracking it. GTA BOOM's running tracker, read on September 21, now sorts every GTA 6 music claim into columns: material Rockstar has named as part of the album, stations it has confirmed, clues visible in official material, direct artist statements, campaign participation, and claims that remain reported, unverified.

Two of those columns had a busy month. Under "radio clues" sit the V-Rock logo printed on Jason's shirt in official promotional material and a Vice City FM advertisement spotted on a bus shelter during the Extended Look — both establish that the brands exist inside GTA VI's world, and neither proves a playable station. Under "reported, unverified" sits the loudest rumour of the year: Drake getting his own station, which Jermaine Dupri described on New Rory & Mal and which neither Rockstar nor Drake has confirmed (GTA BOOM).

The column that matters most here is the first one. The tracker files the six released singles as album tracks and nothing more: Rockstar has not said that any of them plays on an in-game station, and the details it promised about the dynamic score and "the next evolution of in-game radio" have still not arrived. Eight weeks before release, one product is confirmed — 34 tracks, November 19 — and the other, the radio dial players will actually hear, remains unannounced (GTA BOOM).

Update — September 21: the song the Rolling Stones had already cut in 1963

Keith Richards' contribution to the album is not a new composition, and the deeper story is that it is not even new to his own band. "Bright Lights, Big City" is a Jimmy Reed single from 1961, and the Rolling Stones had already recorded their own version of it — in 1963, during their first sessions at IBC Studios in London (Blues Actu; Rock&folk).

That take stayed in the vault for almost fifty years. It was finally released in 2012, on the Super Deluxe edition of the GRRR! compilation, on a bonus disc titled IBC demos, 1963. So when Richards sings it on November 19, he is covering a song his own band had already cut at its very first sessions — sixty-three years earlier (Blues Actu; Rock&folk).

The Reed connection runs the length of the band's career, which is what makes the choice read as a homecoming rather than a licensing decision:

• 1963 — the same IBC sessions also produced the Stones' version of "Honey What's Wrong".
• 1964 — their cover of "Honest I Do" landed on their British debut album, "Little by Little" took its rhythm from Reed's "Shame, Shame, Shame", and the band played several Reed songs for the BBC.
• 1981 — "Black Limousine" drew on the playing and structure of "You Don't Have to Go".
• 2016 — they went straight back to Reed's catalogue with "Little Rain" on the all-blues album Blue & Lonesome.

The extended family kept going on its own, too: Ronnie Wood released "Mr Luck — A Tribute To Jimmy Reed" in 2021, drawn from a 2013 tribute concert with guests including Mick Taylor, Paul Weller and Bobby Womack (Rock&folk).

Rolling Stone's listen sets the new version against the original and finds Richards pushing harder than his hero: he plays the guitar with more force than Reed did, sings in what the magazine calls a "Mississippi-via-Dartford drawl", and drops the harmonica break — where the 1961 take carried a searing harp solo, Richards plays it straight all the way into the fade. The track is, in the album's own framing, meant to "capture the electric energy of Grand Theft Auto VI's world of Vice City and Leonida". Richards has given no details on when or where it was recorded, or whether it came out of the Foreign Tongues or Hackney Diamonds sessions (Rolling Stone).

It is also his first solo release in two years: the previous one was a cover of Lou Reed's "I'm Waiting for the Man", released in March 2024 on the tribute album The Power of the Heart: A Tribute to Lou Reed (Blues Actu).

"Bright Lights, Big City" is a standard before it is a GTA song — The Animals, Them and Johnny Winter all cut it (Rock&folk). That is the useful reminder at the end of a week spent counting tracks: the album is 34 songs written for the game, but at least one of them arrives with sixty years of blues history attached, and with a 1963 Stones demo sitting in a vault.

Nothing else about the release has moved. Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album remains 34 original tracks, six streaming since September 17, 28 still unnamed, out November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games).

Update — September 20–21: the disc paradox, explained from France — and two stores that refuse to stock the game

The irony that made GameSpot's headline has now been written up at length in France. Jeuxvideo.com published its own reading of the situation on September 20: Rockstar has confirmed that no disc will ship inside the game's box — the physical edition is a "code in a box", a download voucher in a plastic case — while the same publisher is putting the soundtrack out on CD and double vinyl nine weeks later (Jeuxvideo.com).

The piece spells out what that means commercially. Anyone buying the boxed version finds a slip of paper carrying a code, and that code is tied to a single PlayStation Network or Xbox account — so a copy can no longer be lent, traded or sold on, which is the practical end of the second-hand market for the biggest release of the year. Take-Two's defence is that optical-drive-free consoles (PS5 Digital, PS5 Pro, Xbox Series S) have made a disc less relevant (Jeuxvideo.com).

The player reaction it collects is the part the album announcement produced. "So you're releasing the music on CD and Vinyl but the game not on disc?" replies one user under Rockstar's own post; "the irony to release this on disc but not the game itself", adds another (Jeuxvideo.com).

The harder consequence does not come from players, though. Two independent retailers have said they will not stock the game at all. Video Games Plus, a Canadian chain that has been selling games for close to forty years, cited a company policy of not carrying console products that contain nothing but a download code: "Should Rockstar one day release a physical edition containing a disc in the box, we would be pleased to carry and support that version for our customers." Loot Box Gaming, an online store based in Delaware, put the same refusal more bluntly: "If a product can't honor the people who pay their hard-earned money to purchase it, then we have no business trying to sell it to our customers, whom we value above anything else." Both cited game preservation (IGN; VICE).

Jeuxvideo.com adds that other independent shops followed, including the French retailer La Console du Temps — the kind of business whose economics rest on second-hand stock, and which cannot resell a box that contains nothing but a code (Jeuxvideo.com).

Context matters: those refusals date from late June, when pre-orders opened and Rockstar confirmed the box would hold a code rather than a disc. The September album campaign is what put them back into circulation — because the same publisher that will not press a game disc is pressing two vinyl records and a limited edition whose discs are filled with blue liquid, and that edition sold out in minutes. The record, in other words, proves that the public still pays for objects. The game's box is the one product in the franchise that no longer is one.

Update — September 22: the announcement is circulating again as if it were new

Five days on, the story has finished its trip through the news cycle, and the surest sign of it is that outlets are filing September 17's announcement as fresh copy. On September 22, V13 Media published it under the headline "'Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album' Announced by Atlantic Records", while Rockstar's own Newswire page from September 17 climbed back to the top of the aggregators. September 21 had already produced the explainer wave: Rock Cellar led on Keith Richards' "Bright Lights, Big City", Red Bull filed "All confirmed songs, albums and radio stations", Yahoo ran the 34-track line and Mashable revisited the Instagram messages Travis Scott, Morgan Wallen and Future posted on September 15 — the artwork drop that this release later turned out to be promoting. In French, Korben and AVcesar filed their own versions of the same ground. The same morning, the music magazine Headliner ran it as "Travis Scott, Yung Lean and PinkPantheress feature on new Grand Theft Auto VI album" — a headline built on the six streaming singles rather than on the 34-track record behind them, over body copy that repeats the November 19 date, the three Atlantic editions, the eight retail exclusives and the same six songs, in the same order, with nothing added (Headliner Magazine).

Read together, none of those pieces moves the product. Not one of them names a seventh song, prices a new edition or dates the "dynamic score" and the "next evolution of in-game radio" Rockstar promised on September 17. What they measure is reach: the album is now a story that general desks re-publish on their own schedule, which is why a search on September 22 surfaces five-day-old announcements next to that morning's posts.

The position is therefore unchanged and worth restating: 34 original tracks, six streaming since September 17, 28 still unnamed, released November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games; V13 Media; Headliner Magazine; Korben).

Update — September 22: the HMV pressing's poster has a name

The retail map has been assembled shop by shop since September 17, and the British entry now has the piece it was missing. The poster bundled with HMV's version of the album is the "Jason and Lucia Motel" artwork, according to iGrandTheftAuto, which identified the print the same day pre-orders opened (iGrandTheftAuto).

A first look at the same pressing, published the same afternoon by T5G, describes it from the other direction — a poster showing Lucia and Jason robbing a store, packaged with a transparent blue-and-pink double LP (T5G). Two accounts, one object: an HMV-exclusive package built around an existing piece of Jason-and-Lucia key art rather than a newly commissioned illustration, which is how the retailer pressings have been sold from the start.

HMV's own product page, read on September 22, fills in the prices. The hmv Exclusive pressing is listed at £44.99 — the same figure as Rockstar's standard vinyl — while the non-exclusive 12-inch on the same page sits at £34.99 and the CD at £10.99 (HMV). The £34.99 line is the more interesting of the two: it is roughly ten pounds below the official store's standard pressing, at a moment when the physical campaign has mostly been described through its most expensive tiers.

It also closes a comparison the earlier updates left open. Target's poster carries a Jason illustration; HMV's, on both descriptions, carries Jason and Lucia together — so the two best-documented retail posters are not the same image, and the "each featuring a new artwork" formula in Rockstar's Newswire is doing exactly what it says. As with every other pressing detail, though, none of it comes from Rockstar: the identification rests on a first look and a product page, not on an announcement.

Nothing else about the record has moved: 34 original tracks, six streaming since September 17, 28 still unnamed, released November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games).

Update — October 9: two more singles, and 26 tracks still unnamed

The album has a second batch of singles. On October 9, 2026, Rockstar named two more tracks from Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album — "Suzuki" by Fuerza Regida and "Don't Chart" by Cardi B — and released both on all major streaming services, the publisher said in its own post on X (Rockstar Games). It is the first time the record has grown since launch week: the six songs that arrived on September 17 were all published in a single wave, while this pair is the first to be added on its own.

The count that matters has moved with it. The album now has eight named tracks out of 34, which leaves 26 still unnamed — with the record and the game both out on November 19, a little under six weeks away.

Both names were visible before Rockstar confirmed them. On October 4, the album's Spotify page briefly carried two placeholder entries with artists attached — track 10 credited to Fuerza Regida and track 19 to Cardi B — a change spotted by iGrandTheftAuto and relayed by the Chinese outlet 3DM, which noted the names were later removed (iGrandTheftAuto; 3DM). Two days later, on October 6, the same account reported that Spotify had relabelled every unreleased track so that "Grand Theft Auto VI" appeared as the artist instead of the individual names, wiping the two credits from view again (iGrandTheftAuto).

The teases followed the leak. On October 7, Fuerza Regida publicly hinted at its involvement, and Cardi B posted Lucia's "Baddie" hoodie — a piece of confirmed GTA VI merchandise — to her Instagram Story (iGrandTheftAuto). Fuerza Regida's title then surfaced a day early through the least official channel available: a streamer's video drew a copyright claim that named the song "Suzuki", per the account @carrerovYT (iGrandTheftAuto).

The context around the drop had been set the day before. Rockstar's Newswire said on October 8 that "more singles are coming" from the album and that details about the dynamic score were still to follow — in the same update that revealed the game's first six in-game radio stations and their twelve hosts (read our breakdown). Rockstar has still not said which of the album's songs, if any, play on which station: the record and the radio dial remain two separate products (Rockstar Games).

What the pair changes is the album's centre of gravity. Fuerza Regida is a regional-Mexican act — corridos tumbados out of San Bernardino, California — and Cardi B is a Bronx rapper, so the two additions push a bill that already carried Rauw Alejandro and the CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso / PinkPantheress / Fred again.. team-up further toward Latin and Spanish-language music. Cardi B also gives the record a second marquee American rap name alongside Travis Scott, whose "RHYNO" opened the campaign's first wave.

Nothing else about the release has moved. Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album remains 34 original tracks, eight now named, released November 19 alongside the game — with more singles still to come, on Rockstar's own account (Rockstar Games).

Update — October 9: the two new singles land at tracks 10 and 19

The release also settled something the October 4 leak had only guessed at. Credits for the two new songs place "Suzuki" at track 10 and "Don't Chart" at track 19 (Genius) — exactly the two slots Spotify briefly showed as placeholder entries on October 4, crediting Fuerza Regida and Cardi B respectively, before wiping the artist names two days later. The positions recorded from that now-deleted listing turn out to have been right, a small but useful confirmation in a rollout otherwise reconstructed from leaks.

The same credits fill in the production side, which the campaign had left largely undocumented: "Suzuki" is produced by Synthetic, and "Don't Chart" by Vinylz (Genius).

Both songs also got an official video on Atlantic Records' YouTube channel, published in the same overnight window as the streaming release — the same treatment the six September singles received, rather than a single album trailer (Atlantic Records).

Nothing else about the release has moved: 34 original tracks, eight now named, 26 still unnamed, out November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games).

Update — October 15: the launch trailer names a ninth track, and credits the score

Rockstar published the GTA 6 launch trailer on October 15, 2026 — a 90-second video, captured on PS5 — and named the song playing over it: "Flower in a Hurricane" by Justice, featuring Tame Impala, SZA and King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard (VGC). VGC reports that Rockstar says the single will be available on Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album, the record announced on September 17 with 34 original tracks for November 19. That takes the album's named count to nine of 34, five weeks before release.

The same announcement closes another loop. VGC and Push Square both report that Rockstar credits Justice — the French electronic duo — with composing the game's original score, which is the "dynamic score" whose details Rockstar's Newswire had said on October 8 were still to come, without naming anyone. GameSpot treats it as its own story, under the headline "GTA 6 Is Getting An Original Score From Electronic Duo Justice".

It is also a change of method. Trailer 1 used Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" and Trailer 2 used The Pointer Sisters' "Hot Together" — licensed records, both decades old (PC Gamer). The launch trailer instead carries a track written for GTA VI and sold as part of the album, which makes the video a piece of the record's marketing as well as the game's.

Nothing else about the release has moved: 34 original tracks, nine now named, 25 still unnamed, out November 19 alongside the game (Rockstar Games).

Update — October 31: the score has its own record, and the album's lead single charted

Rockstar closed the loop it opened on October 15. In a Newswire post published on October 29, 2026 at 13:00 UTC, the publisher confirmed that Grand Theft Auto VI: Original Score by Justice gets a release of its own on December 11, 2026 — 30 tracks plus "a number of digital bonus tracks included across all formats", on streaming, double CD and triple vinyl (VGC; Rockstar Games). The details about "the dynamic score" that this article was still listing as unannounced in its October 15 update have therefore arrived, three weeks after the launch trailer named Justice as the composer.

The two records are separate products and should not be added together. The Album is 34 songs, released November 19 with the game. The Original Score is Justice's instrumental, adaptive material — the music that plays over missions rather than on the radio dial — released 22 days later. One track sits on both: "Flower in a Hurricane", track 6 of the album and the launch-trailer single (RockstarINTEL; VGC).

The score's physical campaign repeats the album's playbook at a lower price. Retailers list the limited Triple Crystal Clear 3LP at £49.99 / $55.99, the standard black 3LP at £44.99 / $54.99 / €47.99 and the double CD at £14.99 / $21.99 / €20.99 (GTAVice.net; VGC). Set beside The Album's £44.99 for two discs, the score returns a third disc for the same money — a reminder that the £108.99 liquid-filled pressing remains the outlier of the whole campaign, not its norm.

Then there is the chart data, which is where the album's own numbers moved. Billboard reports that "Flower in a Hurricane" debuted at No. 62 on the Hot 100 dated October 31, 2026, on 4.6 million official US streams, 1 million radio audience impressions and 1,000 sales in the October 16–22 tracking week, per Luminate (Billboard, Xander Zellner, October 26). It is the third song from The Album to reach the Hot 100, after Morgan Wallen's "Last Thing You Need" (No. 9 peak) and Travis Scott's "Rhyno" (No. 84), both of which entered on the chart dated October 3.

The same entry carries two career firsts worth recording. It gives King Gizzard & The Lizard Wizard its first Hot 100 hit after 28 studio albums since 2010, and it is Justice's second, after the duo's guest spot on The Weeknd's "Wake Me Up" (No. 45 peak, 2025); the track also landed at No. 2 on Hot Dance/Electronic Songs (Billboard). For a soundtrack single, that is the pattern this campaign has followed from the start: a song tied to a game charting on its own terms, inside its own genre, before the game exists.

The 2013 precedent sharpens the difference. GTA V's score shipped inside The Music of Grand Theft Auto V, released digitally on September 24, 2013 — seven days after the game — as Volume 2 of a three-volume set: 22 tracks and 78 minutes, arranged by DJ Shadow from material by Tangerine Dream, Woody Jackson, The Alchemist and Oh No. Its retail CD and vinyl only followed in December 2014 (GameSpot; Wikipedia). GTA VI splits the two jobs instead: the songs arrive on launch day as a 34-track album with a vinyl campaign, and the score follows 22 days later as a 30-track record in its own right.

Nothing has moved on the album itself. Grand Theft Auto VI: The Album remains 34 original tracks, nine released, 25 unnamed, out November 19 alongside the game — 19 days from now — with the full tracklist still unpublished (Rockstar Games).

See also

• GTA VI's Original Score by Justice: 11 December, 30 tracks, and the 30-versus-50 question
• GTA 6's in-game radio is getting a 'next evolution' — and Rockstar has not said what it is
• GTA 6 characters explained: Jason, Lucia and everyone confirmed so far
• GTA 6 billboards appear in Los Angeles, Miami and New York — with Spotify's logo on them
• GTA 6 soundtrack teaser: ten artists, six images, and a studio that has said nothing
• GTA VI launch guide: release date, editions and pre-orders
• GTA 6 Collector's Edition: leaked 'Vice City: Leonida' box photos revive the disc debate