There’s nothing quite like placing a song with a film, TV series, video game or advertisement to give it a completely new lease of life, years or decades after it was released. Synchronisation, or syncing as it’s better known, is the holy grail for artists and their labels, an opportunity to licence a song in a whole new context to a whole new audience and marketplace.
Such is the case with Tom Petty’s Love Is A Long Road from his 1989 debut solo album Full Moon Fever. On 4 December 2023, Rockstar Games officially launched the first Grand Theft Auto VI trailer and the track they used to give the action-adventure game its Florida vibes is Petty’s breezy, sun-kissed Love Is A Long Road. Within the first week, the trailer racked up more than 128 million views. The song meanwhile has also seen a huge leap in streams. Spotify reported that in the week following the trailer’s release, streams for the track increased by 36,979%.
