GTA6 has 23 radio stations; six have names

The count this site asked for on 8 October, and again on 30 October, has arrived — in a magazine rather than from the company that sells the music. Edge issue 430, on sale 29 October, carries Simon Parkin’s sixteen-page cover story after a visit to Rockstar North in Edinburgh, and its print edition states that Grand Theft Auto VI will have 23 radio stations. GTAVice isolated the line on 29 October and said plainly that the number comes from the physical edition; Chinese round-ups picked it up on 31 October. Rockstar has not printed a total anywhere it controls, and the music page read again this morning still carries six stations and no arithmetic. So the register for this fact is: reported by a named magazine with direct access, replicated by two relays, unconfirmed by the studio. That is a stronger instrument than most of what circulates in the last three weeks of a launch, and it is not an announcement.

The six were never meant to be read as the line-up, and the page said so in a place nobody quoted. Rockstar’s own front page describes the music section as “hand-picked stations from the biggest and widest-ranging selection of in-game radio yet” — the preposition is the whole sentence. On the music page itself each of the six carries the label Preview Station, under a heading, Broadcasting Live Across Leonida, that is written in the present tense of a broadcast rather than a schedule. Radio Times nonetheless summarised the same page as “There are a total of six radio stations”. Set the two side by side and the correction is not pedantic: six of 23 leaves 17 stations with no name, no genre and no host, and a quarter of a dial is not a basis for any judgement about what the radio sounds like.

The previous game is the only comparison that has a number on both sides. The reference enumerations for Grand Theft Auto V’s 2013 launch give 17 stations — 15 music channels and two talk channels — while others count 18 or 19 depending on whether the talk channels are counted separately and whether later additions are folded in; the figure those lists share is roughly 240 licensed songs. Twenty-three is six more than the strictest reading of the last game, which is the first time “biggest” has something to stand on. It also, finally, has room for the two categories Rockstar itself chose to describe the span of the line-up. The sentence reads “from Classic Rock to Talk Radio”, and on 9 October this site noted that neither end of that range was among the six revealed — no classic rock station, no talk station. Seventeen unnamed stations can hold them. The count does not say that they do.

Applied to the music rather than the shows, the number produces an estimate worth stating as an estimate. At Grand Theft Auto V’s density — roughly 240 licensed songs across 15 music stations — a station of this series carries something like sixteen tracks, and 23 stations at that rate would run to the middle three hundreds. The two records Rockstar is selling this quarter hold 64 tracks between them: 34 on The Album, released on 19 November, and 30 on Justice’s score, out on 11 December, with the extras described only as “a number of digital bonus tracks”. That gap is not a scandal and not a comparison of like with like, since album tracks are newly written and radio tracks are licensed. It is a description of what a buyer is being sold: the records are not a sample of the radio, and no arithmetic applied to them says anything about what plays in the car. What the 23 does establish is that the audio side of a 210 GB package is large enough to be worth counting.

Three things 23 does not settle, and each changes the number above it. Songs per station is still unpublished, which is the figure that would make biggest testable against the roughly 240 of the last game rather than against a count of channels — we have now asked twice and been answered with a total instead. Whether podcasts sit inside the 23 or beside it is unresolved: Rockstar’s own sentence couples “in-game radio and podcasts”, and the 8 October reveal introduced on-demand podcasts, playable on foot through headphones connected to the phone, as a separate thing from the stations you hear in a car. If Edge counted broadcast channels and not shows, the audio total is higher than 23. And the count is almost certainly a launch figure, because Grand Theft Auto V’s did not stay at 17 — stations were added years after release, so a number printed three weeks before launch describes the disc, not the life of the game. Whether talk channels are inside the 23 is not stated either, which is exactly the ambiguity that made 17 into 18 and 19 in the older lists.

What this changes for a buyer is nothing, and it is worth being explicit about that after a week of dates. The game is out on 19 November for PlayStation 5 and Xbox Series X|S at $79.99 and $99.99, digital pre-load opens at local midnight on 12 November, and the box holds a download code rather than a disc. What does change is the shape of the campaign. Rockstar has published, in ten weeks, a trailer date, two record dates, a track count for each, a format list, a credit, twelve hosts and a box design — and has declined to publish a total for the radio, in a sentence that reaches for the word biggest and stops before the number. The number turned up in a magazine that has to be bought. When the marketing is this complete everywhere except the denominator, the denominator is the thing being held back, and this week it was held back by everyone except a print run.