I recognised maybe half of it and I have been listening on repeat trying to place the rest. There was a lot of range, some of it much older than I expected for a modern setting.
Has anyone put together a full list of what was actually in the footage? And more importantly, does anyone know whether trailer music has ever ended up on a station in a previous game?
Hearing eighties tracks over modern Vice City footage did something strange to my head... same place, wrong decade, right music.
Five decades explains why I could place half of it and not the rest... some of that is genuinely older than the setting.
the range is the point. a modern florida city has stations playing all of that at once. thats not nostalgia thats just what radio sounds like there
Fourteen tracks across five decades, ranging from eighties rock and synth pop through country to contemporary rap. Someone will have a complete list up within a day.
On your second question: trailer music has occasionally overlapped with in game radio in past titles but it is not a rule, and licensing for the two is negotiated separately. Overlap is possible, not implied.
That effect is almost certainly deliberate. Using period music over a modern setting is how you tell a returning player that this is the same city and not the same time.
Country in the mix is the one people are skipping over and it is the strongest hint that there is a whole region up north that we have barely seen.