While Rockstar’s highly anticipated GTA 6 reveal trailer set plenty of records in its own right, the song playing throughout has also now climbed to new heights off the back of its success.
A decade on from GTA 5, gamers around the world finally got their first look at the sequel earlier this week. GTA 6 was revealed in full on December 4 and it didn’t take long for the first footage to explode across the internet.
In just one day it became YouTube’s quickest-growing non-music video, taking the throne from MrBeast. And just hours later it eclipsed lifetime stats on GTA 5’s reveal trailer from 12 years ago, soaring past 100 million views in no time at all.
Thanks to its unprecedented success, not only has the trailer been everywhere, but so too has the accompanying song. Tom Petty’s 1989 track ‘Love Is A Long Road’ has similarly taken flight on Spotify as millions have added the track to their daily mix.
Just a few days since the GTA 6 trailer went online, streams for the Tom Petty song on Spotify have reportedly increased by a staggering 36,979%. Spotify informed the BBC of this jaw-dropping surge a mere 48 hours after the video first went live.
This rapid climb is compared to its streams on the platform in the week prior, a sudden burst the music streaming platform has allegedly never seen the like of. Spotify supposedly claimed it’s seen similar spikes for soundtracks before, “but never like this.”
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Comparing it to a recent project, BBC cited HBO’s The Last of Us adaptation for following a similar trend. Linda Ronstadt’s Long Long Time had its streams balloon by 4,900%, according to Spotify. Nowhere close to the GTA 6-fuelled growth for Tom Petty.
Another similar example would be Stranger Things Season 4 and its contribution to Kate Bush’s Running Up That Hill. Following its feature in the hit Netflix show, the track hit number one on multiple singles charts and racked up over 137 million Spotify streams after the fact.
Whether Love Is A Long Road will have that kind of staying power thanks to GTA 6, remains to be seen. It’s obviously still early days, but there’s no denying the cultural impact of the franchise. Just a brief snippet has set the internet ablaze and evidently, everything else along with it.
Sharing their enthusiasm on Twitter, Tom Petty’s estate said the musician “loved contributing” previous works to earlier GTA titles like San Andreas. “So it is an honor to have ‘Love Is A Long Road’ featured in trailer one for GTA 6.”
