The music business is in the plot

Every Grand Theft Auto has had music in it. This is the first one that's got the music business in it.

Four of the characters Rockstar has introduced work in or around that business, and they're all connected to each other. They aren't scattered across the map with nothing linking them, and four people tied together like that looks planned to us, more than a coincidence of casting.

Love Fist and Madd Dogg were one-offs

In earlier games the music industry was a joke told on the radio. Love Fist were a parody hair metal band you ran errands for in 1986. Madd Dogg was a rapper whose career you rescued in one strand of San Andreas. Both of them were self-contained, and neither one connected to anything else in the world.

This time it's a network: a promoter, a studio owner, an act and the supplier behind the studio owner's club, all introduced in the same official material and all pointing at each other. That's how Rockstar builds a thread it plans to run through the story, the same way the Grand Theft Auto V heists were all built around one fixer.

The October music news

Since this page went up, Rockstar's named six radio stations (on 8 October), listed a thirty-four track album of original songs, and announced Justice's *Original Score* on 29 October. None of that material mentions Dre'Quan, Boobie Ike or Real Dimez.

One station's worth keeping an eye on for this page, though. Dirty South Classics, hosted by Trick Daddy and Trina, plays regional rap and hip-hop, and it's the obvious home for a Vice City rap duo if Real Dimez ever get airplay. That's our guess, and Rockstar hasn't said they will. The news write-up has the full station announcement.

The other new bit is Boobie Ike's strip club, the Jack of Hearts. A poster on its wall in the Extended Look carries a QR code for something called Peekhole, which fans read as a subscription-app parody (our piece on it). Rockstar hasn't said what it is. A studio and a club with a paid-content poster on the wall means Boobie's whole business is people getting paid for an audience.

What it might mean for how you play

Nothing in this section has been confirmed. It's our own inference, and nobody has reported it.

A studio you can visit, an act whose career goes somewhere, and a promoter who books shows are the raw material for the kind of business layer Grand Theft Auto V put behind Franklin and Trevor. Rockstar's also shown nightlife venues and a cabaret at Port Gellhorn, and those are the sort of places a booked act would play.

None of that's been demonstrated, though. What has been shown is that the four people above exist, that they've got jobs in music, and that they know each other.

What isn't known

We don't know whether you can go inside the studio, whether Real Dimez turn up on the radio inside the game, or whether any of this is something you actually play or just part of the story. We also don't know who voices any of the story characters. Rockstar has named real artists as radio hosts, Bad Bunny, Burna Boy and two members of Slayer among them, but it still hasn't named anyone in the story cast.

And it's not clear whether any of those hosts, or the artists on the album, have anything to do with the music-business story, or whether the radio and the plot are kept apart.