Love Is a Long Road

Rockstar picked Tom Petty's "Love Is a Long Road" to introduce GTA 6 to the world. It plays under the whole of Trailer 1, and Rockstar credits it in the trailer's description on YouTube.

A B-side from a Florida rocker

The song comes from Full Moon Fever, Petty's first solo album, released in 1989. It was never a single in its own right. It came out as a B-side, yet it still reached No. 7 on Billboard's Album Rock Tracks chart (Guitar.com). Petty wrote it with Heartbreakers guitarist Mike Campbell, who told Uncut the chords sound to him like the gears of a motorcycle shifting (Guitar.com).

Petty grew up in Gainesville, Florida, which is why The New York Times headlined its story on the choice "For Florida Vibes, Grand Theft Auto VI Turned to Tom Petty". He had been on a GTA soundtrack before: "Runnin' Down a Dream" played on the radio in GTA San Andreas, and his estate called the GTA 6 placement "an honour" (BBC).

What the trailer did to it

Spotify told BBC Newsbeat that streams of the song rose 36,979% in the days after the trailer, compared with the same point a week earlier, and that it had seen soundtracks jump before but never like this. By the BBC's count it had been streamed more than 11 million times on Spotify at that point, still a fraction of the 600 million for Petty's "Free Fallin'".

Our take: choosing a B-side over one of Petty's hits says a lot about how Rockstar uses music. The sound is Florida, the title fits a couple whose story is a long road, and the song was obscure enough to become "the GTA 6 song" for a new generation instead of a reminder of something else. Rockstar has not said whether it plays on an in-game station, so treat it as a trailer song until launch. If it turns up on the radio, we will add the station here.