A Dataminer Caught Rockstar Pulling a Song Out of GTA V

A dataminer has caught Rockstar Games removing a licensed song from Grand Theft Auto V, thirteen years after it went in, with no mention of it in the patch notes. The track is Moloko's "The Time Is Now" and the station is Non-Stop-Pop FM. The removal landed on 15 September, in a routine PC patch, two months and four days before Grand Theft Auto VI ships with a radio dial of its own. What Tex2 found CONFIRMED as to the post and its metadata. Researcher B resolved the post by identifier through the fxtwitter and vxtwitter endpoints at 2026-09-16T03:08:05Z. Post: x.com/TexFunz2/status/2099802132006187262 Author: @TexFunz2, display name "Tex2", bio field exactly "Dataminer". Account created 17 April 2015, 431,819 followers, 13,591 posts, 2,038 media items. Not blue-verified per the API Created: Tue Sep 15 10:06:55 +0000 2026 Metrics as read: 6,567 likes, 204 reposts, 175 replies, 770 bookmarks, 79 quotes, 642,596 views The post reads, verbatim: Rockstar Games has removed Moloko's "The Time Is Now" song from Non-Stop-Pop FM with the latest update to GTAV Enhanced on PC. What the patch notes say about it REPORTED, not confirmed, and the difference matters. RockstarINTEL wrote the removal up with an RSS pubDate of Tue, 15 Sep 2026 17:30:33 +0000, article retrieved at 2026-09-16T03:05:35Z. It identifies the build as patch 1.73, PC Enhanced only at the time of writing, and states verbatim that Rockstar's official patch notes were "extremely vague and did not say anything about the song's removal". Nobody on this desk has read those patch notes. support.rockstargames.com failed on two attempts, with an HTTP/2 INTERNAL_ERROR at 2026-09-16T03:03:10Z and then an empty reply from the server on an HTTP/1.1 retry at 03:03:27Z. So the omission from the notes is one outlet's reading of a document this desk could not open, and it is labelled that way. Why a removed song matters two months before GTA 6 Songs leave games. Music licences in interactive entertainment are typically term-limited rather than perpetual, which is why long-lived titles lose tracks over time and why older games sometimes ship re-releases with different radio playlists. Licence expiry is the ordinary explanation for a removal of this shape, and it is offered here as the ordinary explanation rather than as the cause, because neither Rockstar nor any rights holder has said anything about why this track went. The licensing account in circulation is an outlet's inference and has been since the story broke. The reason to watch it anyway is that Grand Theft Auto VI will ship with a radio dial licensed the same way, in the same week that its soundtrack became the entire marketing story. Two things follow for a reader planning to buy it. A launch playlist is a snapshot, not a permanent feature. Whatever stations ship on 19 November are licensed on terms nobody outside Rockstar has seen, and the GTA V precedent is that tracks can leave quietly in a maintenance patch years later. The removal mechanism here is a patch, not a re-release. Historically players have associated playlist changes with remasters and platform re-releases. A track that has been on Non-Stop-Pop since 2013 has now gone in an ordinary update to an existing build. What is still open Console propagation is unresolved. The finding is PC Enhanced. Whether the same change has reached PlayStation and Xbox builds is not established by anything this desk has seen. Whether any other track went with it is unknown. One track is named in the post and one track is named in the coverage. Nobody has asked Rockstar. No outlet in this cycle reported putting the question to the company, and this desk did not either. What is and is not established CONFIRMED as to the artefact: a post by a named dataminer with 431,819 followers, created 15 September at 10:06:55Z, stating that Moloko's "The Time Is Now" has been removed from Non-Stop-Pop FM in GTA V Enhanced on PC. Read with 6,567 likes and 642,596 views. REPORTED: the build is patch 1.73, and Rockstar's patch notes do not mention the removal. Both come from RockstarINTEL, and the notes themselves could not be opened from here. UNVERIFIED: the licensing explanation. It is the ordinary explanation for a removal of this kind and it is not a stated cause. Explicitly not claimed: that this tells anyone anything about the GTA 6 soundtrack specifically, or that any particular track is at risk. It tells you how the publisher handles a lapsed licence on a live title, which is a different and smaller thing. Method limits: support.rockstargames.com failed twice, so the patch notes were not read; X has no search from here, so the post was reached by identifier; no console build was checked by anyone. What is actually documented about the next radio dial sits at our confirmed songs page, with the streaming-surge trace as a worked example of how a single trailer track moves real numbers. The rest of today's reporting is on the news desk, the standing record is on the GTA 6 wiki, and the servers list and leaderboards are open for the next 64 days, a count that is this desk's own arithmetic.