Music

Liberty City has nine radio stations in GTA III, plus a tenth slot for your own music: the MP3 Player on PC, the CD Changer on Xbox. Together they add up to about three and a half hours of radio. Music director Craig Conner put it all together: songs, adverts, DJ chatter and station jingles. Rockstar calls it the first game in the series to mix licensed tracks with originals made for the game, and many of those were written by Conner and Stuart Ross, often with other musicians singing. The DJs are real people reading absurd scripts, and the adverts came from Dan Houser and Lazlow, with Lazlow producing. Switch to a police car and the commercial radio gives way to a police scanner.

Head Radio

Pop, alternative rock and adult contemporary, hosted by Michael Hunt. Every one of its seven songs is an in-house creation by a fictional act, written by Conner or Ross. Dil-Don't with "Stripe Summer" and Frankie Fame with "See Through You" are two of them. In the story the station belongs to Donald Love's Love Media and sits in Harwood, Portland.

Double Clef FM

Opera and classical, with Morgan Merryweather on the mic and pieces by Mozart, Puccini, Verdi and Donizetti. Mozart's "Non più andrai" from The Marriage of Figaro (1786) is the oldest piece of music in the whole GTA series. Rockstar describes the station as playing Salvatore Leone's favourite arias. The HUD misspells the name as "Double Cleff FM".

Puccini's "O mio babbino caro", sung by Cecilia Fusco, is listed as present only in the PlayStation 2 version. It was used in the GTA III trailers, and that is the song Rockstar remixed later (more on that below).

K-Jah

Dub and reggae, shown as JAH Radio on the HUD and hosted by Horace "The Pacifist" Walsh. All five tracks come from one record, Scientist's 1981 album "Scientist Rids the World of the Evil Curse of the Vampires". K-Jah is not owned by Love Media and runs no commercials; Horace says as much himself: "Mi have no love fi Donald Love".

Rise FM

Trance and house, presented as a live set from The Planetarium nightclub by Andre the Accelerator, with no commercials. Terry Donovan mixed it, and everything comes from the Generation Records label. One track, Chris Walsh and Dave Beran's "Shake (Revolt Clogrock Remix)", plays twice to fill out the station's loop.

Lips 106

Top 40 pop with a host called Andee. The songs are original creations made for the game, such as Fatamarse's "Bump to the Music" and Lucy's "Forever". The one exception is Da Shootaz with "Grand Theft Auto", the only song reused from an earlier game; it first appeared in the original 1997 Grand Theft Auto. Some lyrics were censored for profanity, notably in that song and in "Bump to the Music".

Marydancin's "Wash Him Off" was cut from the station and survives only briefly in its opening. Rockstar did release the full song later.

Game Radio FM

East Coast hip hop, with DJ Stretch Armstrong and Lord Sear playing themselves; Stretch Armstrong mixed all the songs. The name comes from Game Recordings, which produced most of them. The playlist has Royce da 5'9" ("We're Live (Danger)", "I'm the King", "Spit Game"), Nature, JoJo Pellegrino, Black Rob, and Agallah with Sean Price. "We're Live (Danger)" samples Hall and Oates' "Maneater".

Black Rob's "By a Stranger" and Agallah and Sean Price's "Rising to the Top" are here too.

MSX FM

Drum and bass and jungle, with MC Codebreaker on the mic and music mixed by DJ Timecode. Every track is from his 2001 mix album "01.1" on the Moving Shadow label, and the station's 101.1 frequency points at that CD. MSX stands for Moving Shadow, whose catalogue numbers began with MSX; in the beta the station was simply called Moving Shadow Radio. The playlist has 11 tracks.

Aquasky's "Spectre" and D. Kay's "Monolith" are in the rotation as well, as is Rascal and Klone's "Get Wild".

Flashback 95.6

1980s pop with a host named Toni, and a playlist built entirely from the soundtrack of the 1983 film Scarface, produced by Giorgio Moroder. It has five songs: Debbie Harry's "Rush Rush", Elizabeth Daily's "Shake It Up" and "I'm Hot Tonight", Paul Engemann's "Scarface (Push It to the Limit)" and Amy Holland's "She's on Fire". Maria Conchita Alonso's "Vamos a Bailar" is on the film soundtrack but not on this station, according to the tracklist. Toni's mention of Duran Duran before "Shake It Up" is muted in every version of the game. Toni later hosts Flash FM in Vice City.

Chatterbox FM

The series' first talk station and still the only one in GTA III: Lazlow takes calls from Liberty City residents. It is also the first appearance of Lazlow and of Fernando Martinez in the series, and Toni Cipriani and Maria Latore call in too. Lazlow met Rockstar managing director Terry Donovan in 2001 before E3, and the writing took about four to five months at Dan Houser's apartment. Guests and callers were played by Lazlow's friends and neighbours, his father included, and recorded in New York. Credited voices include Debi Mazar, Michael Madsen and Dan Houser. Some talk radio content was changed after the 11 September 2001 attacks, along with other edits to the game.

Releases and later changes

Before launch, DMA Design made a promotional Soundtrack Sampler CD with roughly 15 minutes of Lips 106 and Game Radio FM. It was never sold in shops. Derrick May's "Kaotic Harmony" was used in the reveal trailer but is not on the in-game radio.

For the 10th anniversary, on 7 December 2011, Rockstar put the original Head Radio music on iTunes for the first time, as a seven-track album. A seven-track Lips 106 album followed in December 2011, with the cut "Wash Him Off" included. On 31 January 2012 came the 10th Anniversary Remix of "O Mio Babbino Caro" on iTunes and Amazon, which also plays in the 10th Anniversary Edition launch trailer; Rockstar's Downloads page lists it as the Hudson Mohawke Remix.

In April 2013 Rockstar published official Spotify and iTunes playlists for the GTA III stations. K-Jah was on Spotify only, and MSX FM on iTunes only. On 13 December 2021 Rockstar and NTS Radio aired "The Sound of Grand Theft Auto: The Classics", a four-hour tribute to the music of GTA III, Vice City and San Andreas.

The Definitive Edition of the same year removed some music from the original versions. Rockstar said the music matched the 2014 re-releases, and the more than 30 missing songs were from Vice City and San Andreas. In the GTA III remaster, Head Radio, Double Clef FM, Flashback and MSX FM use their Liberty City Stories logos on the radio wheel. The Definitive Edition trailer uses a remix of "O mio babbino caro", but the aria itself is not in the game.

Unconfirmed: Tom Novy's "Back to the Streets" appeared in the German TV commercial and is believed to have been planned for the soundtrack and then cut. On the PC version, Rise FM appears not to have been remastered, which would explain why it sounds lower in quality than the other stations.