Nearly Everyone On Listen To Your Heart Broke This Unspoken Bachelor Nation Rule

On last year's season of Bachelor in Paradise, contestant after contestant arrived on the beach all with the same announcement: They'd recently attended Stagecoach country music festival (and met Blake Horstmann). Now, The Bachelor has welcomed a new show to the franchise that is about music, yet the participants aren't following in their BiP counterparts' footsteps: Hardly anyone in the Listen to Your Heart cast attended Stagecoach. Gasp.

Or, at least, they didn't attend last year's Stagecoach, which means they didn't cross paths with any other members of Bachelor Nation there prior to filming Listen to Your Heart. All of the cast members on Listen to Your Heart are active on Instagram, but only one of them posted about attending the music festival. And if you guessed that the one outlier was LA-based singer Trevor Holmes, you'd be right. It's obvious why: He's prone to drama and has already had a taste of fame by appearing on American Idol. Obviously, he had to go.

Just kidding, the real reason Trevor was more likely to go than the others is because he already lives in Southern California where the Stagecoach festival is held.

As for the other contestants, they all posted about doing other things around the time of Stagecoach or didn't post at all — and if you're attending Stagecoach and are a musician and are the type of person who is willing to be on reality TV, you're probably going to post about it if you do attend.

Contestant Julie Rae was attending a Maren Morris concert in Philadelphia during Stagecoach 2019. Mel Taevin was hanging out with friends in New York. Savannah McKinley was at the NFL Draft in Nashville. Ruby Jane Smith was performing her own show in Los Angeles.

Joking aside, what all this really highlights is a difference between this group of Bachelor stars and the ones that have come before them. In recent years, the classic Bachelor phrase "there for the right reasons" has lost all meaning. Even the people who go on the series looking for a spouse are also very much aware that they can make a career out of the show, whether they find love or not. Some Bachelor/ette contestants are even Instagram influencers before they join the show.

But on Listen to Your Heart, everyone is blatantly there to advance their singing careers, which means, for a lot of them, that's their sole focus in life. (There is some influencing going on, though. Notably, Savannah is getting that #ad money.) So, while other Bachelor stars have Instagram accounts that look picture perfect, ready for their sponcon careers to take off the second they leave the mansion, these people clearly have different priorities. They're still looking for career help, but they're more about posting full of clips of their performances. But that lack of influencer sheen means their feeds are full of remarkably average hangouts with friends and blurry pictures of dogs. Barely famous reality stars: They're just like us.

While the Listen to Your Heart cast is on the show for fame, it's sort of exciting that their aspirations are openly encouraged by the show itself. Everyone knows what the situation is, which evens out the playing field. Now, we'll just have to see if anything changes for these singers as their fame grows. When Bachelor in Paradise eventually comes back, some of these singers could move on to their second Bachelor show and make the career change from Musician on a Reality Show to Reality TV Star/Influencer Who Happens to Sing Really Well. Hey, Chris Harrison said it could happen.