I beat GTA 4 last year (yea I was 10 years late) and I mostly listened to Vladivostok FM which apparently was the station hit the most.
The game will simply not be the same and I agree that removing songs from people who have bought the game already makes it worse.
Does this mean that people who had CD/DVD copies were better off?
Yes, people who bought the DVD version of the game back then are much better off, Rockstar can't physically remove the songs from the game even if they wanted to. They should be sued for doing this, even more considering how much money they print with GTA V, this packing together of new sales with previous sales is absolutely the lowest effort result and it's completely inexcusable for a company like them. One thing is removing the songs for new purchases, another entirely different is removing it from games people bought years ago.
That's why I've been moving over to GOG (and changing developers I buy games from). Not only don't you have to use any client to download and update games, but even if you do use the client, you can choose to not update games. With no DRM the games are yours to keep, not being at the mercy of what the developer of the game feels like doing like these rubbish forced updates to remove stuff you already bought.
Steam looks great and convenient at first but any sense of actually having any power over anything is gone with actions like these. The word "Purchase" becomes meaningless. I sure hope that Valve takes a stand against this type of practice and do it
yesterday.
This is not the game that I bought (and EFLC is probably also affected or will be, since it was released later, so the music licenses will probably expire later too).
In fact, without much of the music, it's only half of it. The music in that game made much of the atmosphere.
