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How 'Grand Theft Auto' Is Changing the Way the World Experiences Music (rollingstone.com)
An anonymous reader shares a report: GTA V and its multiplayer GTA Online mode has already proven itself a thriving game and money maker for both developer Rockstar and publisher Take-Two -- with sales approaching 100 million copies and bringing in more than $6 billion, now one of the most successful video games in history is also becoming something else, perhaps not too unexpectedly: A powerful tool for music discovery. Use of music has always been something video game makers Rockstar prides itself on. From the Billy Holiday, Ella Fitzgerald and Dinah Washington songs found in L.A. Noire, a detective action-adventure game, to the mix of 1970s rock in The Warriors game, music is one of the more important elements of pop culture that the developers use to help create memorable times and places for its titles.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the long-running Grand Theft Auto series. While the franchise has always featured some sort of working, in-game radio stations, each new iteration expanded on the concept. By 2013 and the release of GTA V, the game's 15 unique radio stations, packed with 240 fully licensed songs and pre-recorded on-air talent, had become nearly as important as the game itself. [...] In the five years since launch, GTA V and GTA Online gamers have listened to more than an estimated 75 billion minutes of music from the game's 18 radio stations, according to Rockstar's own analysis provided to Rolling Stone.
Nowhere is that more evident than in the long-running Grand Theft Auto series. While the franchise has always featured some sort of working, in-game radio stations, each new iteration expanded on the concept. By 2013 and the release of GTA V, the game's 15 unique radio stations, packed with 240 fully licensed songs and pre-recorded on-air talent, had become nearly as important as the game itself. [...] In the five years since launch, GTA V and GTA Online gamers have listened to more than an estimated 75 billion minutes of music from the game's 18 radio stations, according to Rockstar's own analysis provided to Rolling Stone.
Billie Holiday, not Billy. At least GTA taught Millenials about Alice in Chains. Yeah, at one point popular music was actually good here in the US. Hard to believe.
As an object lesson, look at what has happened to the previous games in the series: they lose music licenses hand over fist. Vice City, San Andreas and 4 have all been hit.
I figured this was going to be about Grand Theft Auto removing music tracks from games it already sold years ago, in a patch. That's a really shitty move and shouldn't really be legal.
GCS/MU/P d- s:- a-- C++++$ UL++ P+ L++ E+ W++ N o K- w--- O M+ V- PS+++ PE Y+ PGP t+ 5- X R++ tv+ b++ DI++ D++ G+ e++ h-
Too much music is legally bound up in what RIAA and whomstelse of music companies decide to tightly clasp to their chests to keep people from using.
If you want to use their music for your own work, even if it is for free, they'll still do whatever they can to take it down and make life painful for you. Yet, no one asked the artists themselves.
I know that for some smaller indie artists if people use their music to promote something or just because it fits well, it will mean a lot to them. This usually happens when someone with little money wants to do something to pay tribute in some way, as they have their own bills to pay. At least many now have the decency to include the name of the artist and the song, but hell no if you are to use big record companies' music anywhere unless you are part of their agenda.
remember when kids were supposed to discover all of their new music in guitar hero?
GTA was the first game I remember which really had a broad variety of music, but that actually turns out to be an annoyance by just the fifth or sixth time you steal a pickup truck and have to listen to some country crap. On the other hand, Wipeout XL, and Need for Speed: Underground and its sequel ...2 had really fantastic music.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
There is a lot of good music out there, but for the most part we lock ourselves into a particular genres. Normally after enough exposure to a point where we get it, we find that it isn't as bad as we thought. However exposure is the key and the real problem.
Video games, or movies, tv shows, etc...
Are a good way to create exposure. Because you will not normally make yourself sit down and Listen to music you don't necessarily like until you learned to like it.
If you don't like Rap, you are not going to listen to it for hours until you realize its appeal. or sit you way through an Opera so you can enjoy classical period music.
However you may play a game with the music in the background and you may get to a point where that song from the genres you hated you are actually looking forward to listening too.
The key to good music is repetition, and expectation. There is some out of the ordinary spice added to it, to make it interesting, but it will resolve back to the familiar.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
Unless GTA V has significantly updated its music library then they've been listening to the same batch of songs for 5 years and a lot like real radio there's only 1 or 2 stations worth listening to further limiting how much you would hear. I would imagine a lot of people don't actually bother and just pipe their own music collection or spotify or whatever over the top.
Wanna buy a shirt?
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Fun as their DJs might be to me the radios were always more of a nuisance than anything.
We all saw what happens with millionaires, they are so disassociated from reality that they shoot Vegas up if they want.
Here's a GTA radio made real with a raspberry pi and a 1970's RCA radio chassis: https://www.raspberrypi.org/bl...
I thought the radio stations on San Andreas and Vice City were the best parts of the game. GTA V, in comparison, has bland, generic tunes, and the talk radio is woefully unfunny and boring.
SeanBaby is much more interesting than I am:
SeanBaby
The last time I played GTA was Vice City.
It seemed every damn car I got into was tuned to the same radio station and started playing " ( Keep Feeling ) Fascination " by The Human League.
After the Nth time hearing it, ( Where N equals a ridiculously large number ) I made a new rule. Any time I climbed into a vehicle and it started up, I would immediately drive off the nearest cliff . . .
I refuse to listen to that damn song to this day lol
Good to hear Rockstar has expanded their selection a bit in the years since.
An incredible example of Slashdot Editors mistaking their tiny bubble for something important.
And of course, Slashdot software removed the multiple > between "The World" and "GTA players", because IT'S STILL SHIT.
Let me axe you sumthin. Is dey gonna plays us some real beats or are they gonna mix in some classical musics or sum sheeeit? Ita better get out tha werd about life in DA hood and sticking it to da man. Dem game playin piccaninnies shud be jibing to gangsta rap like dey is sum real homies. Powa to all my fella niggas in deh hood, dis is sure to get da message out.
Whenever I steal a car IRL I always leave the owner's station on or play whatever CD is currently in the radio. My exposure and taste in music has greatly diversified.
You can thank the FCC for allowing companies like ClearChannel to buy up radio stations, homogenize them. It seems to me, that from there, they just drop an iPod Shuffle down on a table, add a few DJ breaks, and call it done, playing the same 50-100 licensed songs from there on out, except with an old "King Biscuit Flower Hour". In just a few years, they turned radio from a living, thriving medium to a time warp of 70s garbage, and made the medium all but worthless except for talk radio and pirate stations.
If they were smart they'd hook in real radio stations and not worry about losing licenses.
Considering the speed they get patched out of the game, that's not too much. Maybe in 10 years we still have at least one or two working radio channels.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Why'd they stop at minutes? They could've made the metric sound even more fantastic by listing it as "4.5 trillion seconds of music."
For comparison:
Clearly what you are referring to is normal behavior?
Why are all video gamers living in basements in your world ? Does it bother you so much that people play video games that you feel the need to demonize them?
You must be american.
Radio is a terrible medium for music discovery, and every medium after that is even worse.
Do you know why modern music is essentially stupid? Do you know why, since the 60's until today, music has been falling on a spiral of decadence, simplification, and loudness wars? The reason is because 'music discovery' is something you are doing as a background task, while you're busy doing other, more important things. Under those conditions, the only music which can success is catchy, loud and repetitive.
Consider the change from listening to music as an active task you invest money on (going to concerts and music festivals) to listen to music casually in your home (home radio) to listen to music while you do other task (radio on a car) to listen to music while you do many other tasks at one (Spotify in your computer). As time goes on, the music must go out of its way to claim even a fraction of your attention. The end result is garbage music everybody has on but nobody wants to listen to.
No wonder there is a revival of Vinyl and CDs. At least with those mediums you must actively take the disk, but it on a device, press start, and you are somewhat involved on the process, to the point to (at least) give an identity to the music you are listening to. It's very hard to sit down and pay attention to music in your computer because you are trained to use the computer for other things. A few decades ago, many people used to have a listening room or chair, a place to just sit down and listen to the Hi-Fi equipment, doing nothing else. That's the way to enjoy layered, complex music of any genre.
If you are a millenial, chances are you've never actually listened to music. As in, just sit down and listen to an entire album, or even a song. And you don't know what you've been missing.
Or maybe (IOW more likely),
Rap and Opera are 99% discordant, senseless noise and their aficionados are suffering from a version of Stockholm Syndrome.
Enough exposure to CRap and NOpera and you become inured to its absolute absence of any valuable musical or lyrical content and simply become used to the noise. Sort of like those sailors who can sleep right under the catapult stops on an aircraft carrier.
Rap, Opera: Just Say NO!
There seems to be a lot of radio stations but after awhile I find myself not even listening to it. It's the same repetitive songs and commercials every hour or so. It's like a Clear Channel station.
The solutions are make each station 4 to 5 hours long to make it less likely to run into stuff.
Integrate Spotify or insert music service here.
Quarterly music changes for as long as the game is officially supported.. aka while it earns money.
For a game that made 6 BILLION dollars, I think they can afford this feature.
my niggas
Recent Fallout games (3, NV, 4)
All three have great soundtracks, with some (necessary, IMO) overlap.
For me, it's a distraction. I just turn it off.
"I believe in Karma. That means I can do bad things to people all day long and I assume they deserve it." : Dogbert
Many if not all of the songs from GTA3 are on Spotify. Head Radio and Lips 106 are still fun to listen to.
I don't think "packed" and "240" imply anywhere near the same kind of things here.
Let's say it's 1/4 rap, 1/4 country, 1/4 rock, 1/4 classical. I'm not going to subject myself to either rap or country, so already we're at 120 songs. Of those, some will inevitably suck, and we're down to even fewer. Of those, there will be ones that are played out, and I won't want to listen to them, so even fewer. 240 is a drop in the bucket if I'm actually going to spend any serious time in the game.
I have almost thirty thousand songs/tunes in my own music library across multiple genres. I don't think 240 songs, a large number of which will very likely not to be my taste or otherwise worth listening to, can be reasonably described as "packed" unless we're talking about data compression. One of first things I do with most games is turn the music off before its repetitious nature drives me buggy.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Not everyone plays GTA, let alone video games in general.
Oh fuck, quit trying to pretend games are significant. This is no different from a $1.99 Dance Hits of the 80's CD, which has been available for some time now.
We need to ABOLISH COPYRIGHT. Get rid of the concept altogether.
*starts abusing GPL code* :-D
In the day and age of video game streamers, you have to be a completely retarded as a company to not also get the rights to stream the game as intended.
...
Were it not for GTAIV.
Some great tunes in the games, but utterly disgraceful that they have to 'patch out' music every 10 years. (GTA San Andreas 4 or 5 years ago, GTAIV maybe a year or so ago?)
Appalling licensing deals, just a disgrace. I'll assume it's the music industry, being shit-heels.
An't no thing but a chicken wing.