Music & Gaming: Hot Together

For artists seeking to join with deeply engaged followers of music, video video games can act as a direct pipeline.

Take Grand Theft Auto, the massively profitable franchise well-known for its groundbreaking open worlds, over-the-top violence and killer music by way of in-game radio stations. The franchise’s fifth and most up-to-date installment included radio stations curated by artists Frank Ocean and Flying Lotus, with the latter even writing music particularly for the sport.

Of course, within the case of GTA, “most recent” means over a decade in the past. With GTA VI lastly set to launch subsequent spring, the latest trailer, which dropped in May, garnered over 123.8 million views on YouTube as of July 8. 

And the track prominently featured all through the trailer, “Hot Together”  — a 1986 deep reduce by R&B act The Pointer Sisters, off the group’s twelfth studio album — noticed an enormous spike in listenership following the trailer’s debut.

A have a look at international On-Demand Audio (ODA) streams by way of Luminate CONNECT exhibits “Hot Together” averaged simply 3,900 weekly streams previous to the GTA VI trailer. Streams shot as much as 1.2M the week of the trailer’s launch and peaked the next week at 2.9M. 

In simply eight weeks post-integration, the observe amassed nearly 9.6M streams globally. Not dangerous contemplating it racked up practically 300K all through all of 2024. 

In normal, avid gamers have collectively proven a love for music. Nearly 1 in 4 U.S. avid gamers are music “super fans,” that means they spend 26% extra money on leisure than the typical U.S. shopper and clock round 260 hours every month throughout gaming, music, video and different media, based on Luminate’s Entertainment 365 survey. 

Add the truth that Grand Theft Auto particularly is understood for its soundtracks and valued by followers for its music discovery, and you’ve got a gaming franchise that’s particularly primed to supercharge an artist’s streams. 

As famous in Luminate’s 2025 Midyear Music Report, launched earlier this month, practically 200M international Interactive On-Demand Audio streams have been tracked by means of the second quarter of this yr. Interactive streams are ODA streams from interactive (gaming) platforms that enable customers to decide on their very own music and interact with songs as a part of the expertise, clearly exhibiting the expansion on this house.

Whether it’s a present chart-topper or a forgotten traditional, music in video games is quick evolving into probably the most highly effective methods to have interaction audiences throughout genres and generations.