GTA V quietly loses Moloko's 'The Time Is Now' as a radio licence lapses
Rockstar patched Moloko's 'The Time Is Now' (2000) out of GTA V's Non-Stop Pop FM on September 15, 2026 and explained nothing — an expired licence, as in GTA IV's 2018 removals, is the standard explanation. Fan trackers now count more than 20 licensed tracks quietly deleted from GTA V since 2013.
The short answer
Yes — and Rockstar never said a word about it. On the morning of September 15, the studio pushed a small GTA V / GTA Online patch whose only visible effect is the disappearance of Moloko's "The Time Is Now" (2000) from Non-Stop Pop FM, the pop station added with the 2014 re-release and hosted in-game by Cara Delevingne. The change was found by dataminer Tex2, not by an announcement, and Rockstar has published no patch notes explaining it (RockstarINTEL; Sportskeeda).
An expired music licence is the reason every outlet has settled on. It is also the only one that fits: no in-game replacement, no statement, no patch-note line.
A patch that was never announced
The removal first showed up in the PC build's update — Sportskeeda reported it against GTA V Enhanced Edition — and it is the kind of change that only exists because the game is now a live service, patching itself on every platform at once. In the PS3 and Xbox 360 era a tracklist was frozen on a disc. Today a licensed song can be deleted from tens of millions of installs overnight, without a word (TheGamer).
The detail carries a small historical footnote. "The Time Is Now" was never part of the original 2013 release: it was added with the PS4 and Xbox One versions in 2014, as one of the tracks kept back from previous-generation hardware, and it has been on every later build since (GTA Wiki). A player who still owns an unpatched disc copy therefore hears a version of GTA V that no longer exists on any storefront.
Why songs keep vanishing
Grand Theft Auto's radio is built on licensed music, and licences are rented, not bought. The mechanisms are unglamorous, and both have been visible before:
- Term expiry. Rockstar negotiates a fixed period, then either renews or patches the track out. In 2018 an update stripped several songs from GTA IV's stations for exactly that reason (TheGamer).
- Legal exposure. Artists who run into serious legal trouble have seen their catalogue pulled from re-releases — fans have documented both patterns over a decade of GTA V updates, counting more than twenty permanently removed tracks (ExpertBeacon; GTAForums).
Every removal lands in the same place: a game that reviews, guides and soundtrack playlists still describe as it was in 2013, but that no longer plays that way.
Why this matters eight weeks before GTA VI
It would be easy to file this as housekeeping on a 13-year-old game. It is more useful as a forecast.
GTA VI's marketing has been built on music almost as much as on Jason and Lucia. The Extended Look confirmed fifteen licensed tracks spanning five decades, Spotify collected them into an official Grand Theft Auto Radio playlist, and the streaming numbers that followed were absurd: a 1977 Captain & Tennille ballad rose 130,730% in global Spotify streams, and average monthly-listener growth of 670% was measured across the artists involved. On September 15 that campaign went one step further, with nine artists — Travis Scott, Future, Metro Boomin, Morgan Wallen, PinkPantheress, Yung Lean, Rauw Alejandro, CA7RIEL & Paco Amoroso and Keith Richards — posting GTA VI-styled artwork within hours of each other.
That soundtrack is being assembled under a licensing model that Take-Two likes to keep flat and final: a one-time buyout, reported at $7,500 per songwriter with no royalties, for a track that will be streamed billions of times. Cheap entry price or not, a buyout still comes with a term — and GTA VI will ship without a disc, so there will be no unpatched physical copy acting as an archive when the first deal lapses. It is the same clock that has been running on GTA V since 2013; the difference is that this time there will be nowhere to hide from it.
Rockstar has not commented on the GTA V patch, and nothing about it touches the launch: GTA VI arrives on November 19, 2026 for PS5 and Xbox Series X|S, with no PC version announced.
