The sounds of ‘Housewives’
Music is where the money is for long-running, indulgent reality TV franchise
On the wall of Russell Howard’s home studio in Marina del Rey, Calif., hangs a plaque from the American Society of Composers, Authors and Publishers commending him for having altered the bedrock of the entertainment landscape by planting, through his company Signature Tracks, more music on American television than almost anybody else in 2016.
Picture the Earth in space: The blue is music provided by Signature Tracks. A lot of the green and brown parts are also music by Signature Tracks, as is the nearby envious moon. Signature Tracks’ signature tracks have been heard alongside Kardashians and Bachelorettes; at the Jersey Shore and Siesta Key; in the Puppy Bowl and during Shark Week. (“We kind of pushed the boundaries” with Shark Week, said Howard’s Signature Tracks co-founder, Adam Malka. Howard elaborated: “We incorporated dubstep with heavy strings, like anticipation — ‘cause it’s Shark Week, you know?”) But most of all, they’ve been heard on Bravo, the Shangri-La of reality TV.
Since 2006, Bravo’s “Real Housewives” franchise has spread across the United States with the efficiency of a bagged salad E. coli outbreak. Originally conceived to capitalize on the popularity of ABC’s prime time soap opera “Desperate Housewives,” the show has fortified itself into a pillar of American culture.The basic premise: Wealthy women in the same vaguely defined social circle are followed by camera teams documenting the drama of their cosseted lives.
What makes the show addictive is the rush of combined envy and superiority it foments. To desire wealth is ultimately to desire more options — about how one could live one’s life, and where, and doing what, if only there was money for it. When you watch “Housewives,” said Shari Levine, Bravo Media’s executive vice president for current production, “you’re watching people who have options and choices make choices that you know you would never make, that you can see might be really wrong.” After they make their choices, you also get to watch the aftermath; Bravo cameras have been following the arcs of choice of several women for more than a decade. “There’s a sense of ‘Wow! I wish I could do that,’” Levine said. “And there’s also sometimes a sense of ‘I would do it better.’”
“Bravo to me is like pop culture eye candy,” said Michael Baiardi, 46, the lead composer of Bravo soundscapes at Soundfile Productions, who has provided music for “The Real Housewives of Beverly Hills” since its first season began eight years ago. “You watch it on a big high-def TV, you’re like, ‘Oh my God, it looks and it sounds like a big piece of candy.’”
This, according to Baiardi, is what candy sounds like: midcentury spy film vibraphones. Tchaikovskian pizzicato — that is, finger-plucked — violin strings. The melodious wooden tock-tock-tock of a struck marimba. Egg shakers. Cymbals which, when struck in succession, vibrate with an ephemeral sound halfway between a wish and a sparkle.
Of the yearslong process of curating the Bravo sound, Baiardi said, “This is like, you know, on a much smaller scale what George Martin did with the Beatles.”
Much like the 8-bit calypso tune that is Mario and Luigi’s constant companion as they dart through their vivid environs, the tinkling, sashaying instrumental leitmotif that accompanies “The Real Housewives” is their trademark. On the shows, the music functions as a kind of omniscient narrator, giving (or purporting to give) clues about characters’ thoughts, and conjuring poignancy out of mundane interactions.
And yet, there is no Bravo department tasked with inventing music for the network’s programming. Each “Housewives” soundtrack is cobbled together using audio from multiple competing businesses; 15 or more companies might contribute, in some form, to a single episode.
Signature Tracks is co-owned by three childhood friends from the Philadelphia Main Line.
Howard is Signature Tracks’ head composer. He entered the music business as an adolescent white rapper, eventually parlaying his interests into a career as a full-fledged producer. Malka had backgrounds in sales and music production. The third founder, David Lasman, used to work as a reality TV producer; the company was his brainchild. When Lasman first approached his friends with the idea, Malka said, “Russ and I kinda thought it was a joke.”
To get music for many scenes, producers send these men general thematic requests (for “sentimental” cues, say). Other times, they ask them to “write to picture”— that is, study specific scenes and soundtrack them directly. A huge volume of the work is for same-day requests, and it adds up fast: A single season can require 2,500 pieces of music to fully score.
The resulting harmonious amalgamation of sounds creates some murkiness. Baiardi estimated that his company Soundfile currently provides 70 percent of the music on Beverly Hills. Lasman estimated that Signature Tracks provides about 80 percent of the music for the same show.
Of all the musical cues on the “Housewives,” one has stuck with Levine since she began overseeing the franchise for Bravo 13 years ago. It’s played only once a season, she said, and only for Orange County. It’s a short instrumental for finale episodes that embodies “a bittersweet sense of sadness,” Levine said. “Like the end of summer.”
It’s important to differentiate the network’s shows by sound, but not stray too far afield from the hypnotic Bravo theme. Signature Tracks is currently working on an untitled Bravo docu-series Lasman describes as “kind of like the Housewives of San Antonio,” starring affluent women of Mexican descent living in Texas.
“We’re incorporating some light Latin sounds to it,” Howard said. “Just light. But enough.”
The money in reality TV music is, in a sound, earning its creators enough to pad around their home studios in pristine $600 Virgil Abloh for Off-White sneakers.
The majority of the cash comes from royalties received any time a cue is played on television, calculated based on factors like a song’s duration, the time of day it aired and the show’s ratings. The rate decreases with each subsequent airing of an episode, but a cable network that fills midday hours with reruns can remain lucrative for years.