Original article: To the surprise of precisely nobody, Xbox and Playground Games' new highly anticipated open-world arcade racer Forza Horizon 6 has been a huge hit so far, with the game enjoying rave reviews from critics, a massive Early Access debut, and an even bigger full launch that's seen nearly 300,000 players get behind the wheel concurrently on Steam alone.

The game's even got a healthy modding scene already, with graphics and audio tweaks, ReShade presets, and more live on the Forza Horizon 6 section of Nexus Mods. One project in particular, though, stands above the rest as particularly cool in my eyes: Spotify Radio, a mod that allows you to play your Spotify music through an in-game radio station.

I first caught wind of it when its author BigJohn0 posted about it on the r/ForzaModding Reddit, and was impressed by its functionality. It takes advantage of Spotify Connect — a feature of the music app that streams music through another device over Wi-Fi — to hook into Forza Horizon 6's Streamer Mode/R10 radio channel and replace it with "FH6 Radio."

While connected to that channel with Spotify Connect on your phone or computer as well as in your car in-game, any music that you play on Spotify will come through in Forza Horizon 6.

That alone is awesome, but what's even cooler is that since the audio is routed through the game's radio system, it's mixed like tunes from its radio stations, and doesn't just sound like flat background music. The in-game radio HUD even correctly lists the artist and track name.

Pretty sick, right? Sadly, though, you can't actually download and use the mod right now, as it was quickly "quarantined" by Nexus Mods' algorithms after they flagged it as potentially dangerous. BigJohn0 says this is because Spotify Radio uses a .dll file, which is sometimes used by bad faith actors to run malware.

Some have asked them to upload the mod on GitHub instead, but BigJohn0 has chosen not to since linking to it on Nexus would go against the site's terms and also because they don't want to publish the source code.

In the end, that means Spotify Radio won't likely be obtainable until Nexus Mods moderators manually review the mod files and verify that they're safe to use, which will hopefully happen sooner rather than later. Keep an eye on it; I'll update this article once it's cleared.

Once the mod is no longer locked down and becomes downloadable again, however, installation will be a very simple process. As the mod page's description states, all you have to do is unzip the mod's files into your Forza Horizon 6 game directory, turn Radio DJ off and Streamer Mode on in-game, and connect Spotify to FH6 Radio in the Connect menu on the app (the button for it looks like a speaker).

Some more good news: the mod works on both the Steam and Xbox on PC versions of the game, and should be completely safe to play with since it's entirely client-side and doesn't upload any data to Forza's servers. The only drawback of Spotify Radio is that it requires having a Spotify Premium membership, as you can't make use of Spotify Connect without one. If you're like me and have one already, though, that's hardly a problem at all.

Will you use the Spotify Radio mod once you can actually download it? Let me know down below.

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Brendan Lowry is a Windows Central writer and Oakland University graduate with a burning passion for video games, of which he's been an avid fan since childhood. He's been writing for Team WC since the summer of 2017, and you'll find him doing news, editorials, reviews, and general coverage on everything gaming, Xbox, and Windows PC. His favorite game of all time is probably NieR: Automata, though Elden Ring, Fallout: New Vegas, and Team Fortress 2 are in the running, too. When he's not writing or gaming, there's a good chance he's either watching an interesting new movie or TV show or actually going outside for once. Follow him on X (Twitter).