You watched all eight episodes. You stalked the cast members on Instagram. You figured out what the heck the deal is with Anna Shay. And now, you're looking for the Bling Empire soundtrack. Well, there's some bad news: The songs on Bling Empire aren't real.
Okay, I mean, the songs are real in that they exist. You can hear them with your own ears, and you can see the subtitles with their sometimes weird lyrics on the bottom of the screen. But, these aren't songs that exist outside of Bling Empire. The soundtrack was made specifically for the show by a company that does the music for a ton of popular reality TV series.
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Bling Empire's soundtrack is produced by Signature Tracks, which makes music for TV shows, trailers, and more. In addition to Bling Empire, Signature Tracks' music can be heard on the Real Housewives franchise, the Bachelor franchise, The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel, during Shark Week, and in many, many more shows you've probably come across — especially if you're a reality fan.
The founders of Signature Tracks were interviewed by the New York Times in 2018 in connection to their work on Bravo shows. Regarding the series Vanderpump Rules, they said that they had to create music that sounded like pop hits, without actually using pop stars. As the article explains, using real pop songs can be expensive. Co-founder David Lasman explained that the music used for Vanderpump Rules is "more aggressive" than what is used on a Real Housewives show, with more hip hop influence to go along with the younger cast.
The songs on Bling Empire sound similar to what has been used on Vanderpump Rules, and both shows also use songs with lyrics that speak to the events in the scene.
To give just a few examples: The lyrics "I got this game on lock/Made my way straight to the top/Girls pulling on my arm like a slot/Anyone that knows me knows, I call the shots" intros a scene in which Christine Chiu's one-year-old son does a photoshoot in a mini Porsche while one-hundred dollar bills rain down on him. During a scene in which the cast go jewelry shopping in Las Vegas, we hear, "I rock twenty-four carats, twenty-four seven, seven, seven." At the beach when the sun is shining bright, an anonymous singer sings, "The sun is shining bright." When Kane Lim and Kevin Kreider visit South Carolina, we get a hip hop beat layered with a country twang.
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Once you realize that there are constantly scene-mirroring songs on these shows, they're impossible not to think about. So, while you'll won't get to hear the rest of Baby G's photoshoot song — it probably doesn't even exist outside of those few lines — you will be forever aware of just how much specifically produced music you're listening to when you watch reality TV.
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