The station assumes various names, becoming increasingly immersed in the games' settings in the years since GTA III. The PC port of Grand Theft Auto III was the first game to include a custom radio station, followed by PC ports of Grand Theft Auto: Vice City, Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas, Grand Theft Auto IV, and Grand Theft Auto V, as well as the Xbox version of GTA San Andreas, the iPhone/iPod Touch version of Grand Theft Auto: Chinatown Wars, and the iOS ports of GTA Vice City and GTA San Andreas.

The feature was primarily exclusive to PC versions, initially taking into consideration the ability for PC hard drives to better support user tracks however, the feature is adopted to a limited scale on two console platforms. A custom radio station is a user-defined radio channel that allows the player to play their own music tracks in GTA games.