Yes, Selling Sunset's "girlboss" songs are real

BuzzFeed News

Since Season 4 premiered last week, fans have been wondering about the show’s “over the top” and “WILD” music. "An average episode can feature snippets of around 15 songs, which usually serve as transitions as the ladies make glamorous exits from cars or tour luxury properties," explains Buzzfeed's David Mack. "They can, admittedly, all start to sound the same after a while. “The stock music in Selling Sunset is like music from a mall in hell,” writer Bolu Babalola tweeted. “They sound like songs except really not? Distinctly genreless.” “It’s like if someone wrote pop songs for aliens,” tweeted Lindsey Adler, a writer for The Athletic. Carrie Hughes, the music supervisor on Selling Sunset, acknowledges the songs tend to share certain themes and sounds, but she insists they’re each unique. “It’s not really the same for me, because I work in music,” she said. “They have the same vibe, but they don’t sound the same to me.” As Mack notes, "a 10-episode season might contain as many as 150 songs, as well as hundreds of other musical cues without lyrics. Hughes needs to listen to thousands of tracks to find the right tune that an editor can then cut footage to. Sometimes an editor needs a specific sound for an emotional moment — say, a fight or tearful breakdown — so Hughes will send along options. Otherwise, she has a playlist ready to go of dozens of 'female empowerment' songs that can be used for any transition where the lyrics don’t matter. She said that showrunner Adam DiVello, who also created Laguna Beach and The Hills, has a strict rule that they never repeat a song." Hughes adds: “The showrunner definitely wanted ‘female empowerment’ (as a theme). The other main word that gets thrown around is ‘feisty.’ So we kind of have two styles of female empowerment. One is just ‘helping all women,’ ‘we’re great,’ ‘we can do this,’ and then there’s more feisty, like, ‘I’m better than you’ vibes.” The reason Selling Sunset uses so much obscure music is because popular music is too costly. “We don’t have the budget for Ariana or Beyoncé or Rihanna,” Hughes says. “We would love to, but we definitely don’t.”

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