Inside the Reality TV Hit’s Music News

The summer of 2024 solidified Love Island USA as a top reality-TV choice for households across the country, and 2025 is proving to be a repeat success. The series — which puts a dozen twenty-somethings on a remote villa in Fiji where they are filmed at all hours, all for the sake of finding love or the possibility of a $100,000 cash prize — has tapped into the zeitgeist yet again. 

All the gold-star elements of last year’s hit have returned: Beloved host Ariana Madix is back, a new crew is in the villa, and incoming drama has ensued. But while last season gave us the iconic trio known as PPG (Leah Kateb, Serena Page and Janna Craig), this season has brought an even stronger soundtrack to every first kiss, challenge, and heartbreak.  The franchise has learned from its original U.K. predecessor, which used bold, indie-pop-forward covers and original music to change the sound of reality TV. The U.S. show has played fast and loose music across the pop spectrum, featuring songs such as Ravyn Lenae’s “Love Me Not” and Tate McRae’s “Run for the Hills” — and last year, it even landed songs by top stars such as Charli XCX, Chappell Roan, and Sabrina Carpenter. 

Love Island USA’s executive producer, James Barker, worked as a queer nightlife DJ before his TV career, and his DJ ear has deeply influenced the pop taste he’s shown on the show. So has his experience watching the original U.K. series: “It really was seeing Love Island UK for the first time where I was like, ‘Oh, it just is a leveling up of reality and how we can tell stories when you have this personal connection to a pop song and you see it used in context of a story that you’re watching on TV,’” Barker recalls. “I think that is where my brain immediately said, ‘One, this is amazing, and more shows should be like this. And two, how do I work on Love Island?”

Rolling Stone spoke with Barker (who called in from Fiji), along with Meryl Ginsberg, Love Island USA music supervisor and president of ASAP Clearances, and Sara Torres, Love Island USA music supervisor and creative and sync supervisor at ASAP Clearances. The three of them unpacked how this show’s music has become the new focal point for fans week by week. With Season Seven gathering 1.2 billion minutes viewed by week two, according to Luminate’s streaming data, anything can happen as islanders put their hearts on the line this summer. 

This interview has been edited and condensed.

What does it take to get big pop songs on the show? What does the process look like for you as a team? 

James Barker: I was very conscious of the fact that last season, we had the big three pop girls. We had Sabrina, we had Charli, we had Chappell. What were we going to be able to do to live up to those big summer hits that existed last year? Working with Sara and Meryl, we come at it with, “Here’s the things that we think are going to be big, and the things we know are already big. And then here’s the indie stuff that no one has really heard of yet.” And we build our arsenal of tracks.

This show is made almost live — it’s about what we shoot on Monday, is edited overnight into Tuesday, and then it goes on air in America Tuesday your time. So, I’m coming to you from Saturday at 4:30 in the morning in Fiji right now and getting ready to go do an episode. But basically, I worked closely with Sara and Meryl to get literally an arsenal of music pre-cleared for the show. We work to get hundreds or sometimes thousands of songs ready to go, because we don’t know where the story’s going. “OK, this track is going to be great for when somebody eventually breaks up with somebody, or this track is going to be the perfect first-kiss song when that comes up.” It’s all based on the feeling and the lyrical content and just making sure that in our minds, whatever story could come of Love Island, that we have something locked and ready to go for that.

It’s also about finding ways to live up to what we have done in previous seasons and ideally top ourselves. From a creative standpoint, that was very much about pushing it a little bit. Pop music is much more diverse these days. It’s not just like, “Oh, it all sounds like this, and you get 100 songs that sound like that.” It’s stuff that’s slightly more rock, stuff that’s slightly more R&B. We’re playing in a bit of a broader sandbox this year than we have in the past.

Sara Torres: Our company has a really good relationship with the labels, and they’re all very excited each season. They’re ready to go as soon as I say, “OK, we’re ready to start taking your pitches now.” We start that process usually two to three months before we’re on the ground, just because, like James said, we have hundreds if not thousands of songs to try and put in there, and we want to make sure everybody’s able to handle that clearance process.

But at this point, the labels have a pretty good understanding of what the Love Island sound is. So they’re very good at narrowing down their artists that they think would be a good fit. But then they also have specific artists that are just huge fans of the show, whether they’re a big artist or not. We try to work well with them and the network to get those big Top 40 songs, but also to find the newer artists whether they’re under a label or not. As long as it’s a good song and we think that it has the right sound, we’re happy to pitch it and hopefully, there’s a scene that works for it.

I’ve had artists come back to me after I tell them, “Oh, the song’s going to be in the show tonight.” And they’re ecstatic because they don’t have to take another shift at the restaurant that they’ve been working at. That money can then go towards paying for more studio time. And for me, that’s what makes all the work worth it.

Barker: That is my favorite thing. When we have put independent artists on who get their first sync or their first time on a big show like this — I’ve seen Instagram videos in the past of them seeing their song on television for the first time, flipping out. As a music head and a music lover, that’s the coolest thing in the world.

In the past, there was such a stigma about reality shows that a lot of artists didn’t want their music associated with reality shows. And that’s starting to turn around now. [Artists are] more and more seeing, well, one, the financial aspect of having your music synced in these kind of shows, and also just the wide reach of viewers. You’re going to get a lot more Shazams with these kinds of shows.

Meryl, I would love to know more about the actual licensing process. What does it mean to go to a label and ask, “Hey, we need this material?” 

Meryl Ginsberg: A lot of it is the relationships that we’ve built. And on the other side, there’s the industry that needs to get their music placed now because it’s a source of income for them. So, because we all know each other, we all know how it works, we have things in place to reach out, they send us pitches. Sara’s really good; especially on Love Island, she and James have a real connection, so they’re able to communicate James’s needs and Sara’s really able to get it for him.

We communicate with them via emails, letting them know what we need. We go in ahead of a show and license it. We set up terms and we set everything up so it’s all in place. Then they do their creative stuff. We get things cleared because at the end of the day, it’s a good show now. The music is a successful part of the show, so artists want to be a part of it, which is nice. It makes it a little easier to get things in.

Love Island is one of the more creative shows musically that I’ve been on for reality TV. This show has really pushed the envelope a bit, opening it up to independent artists and being open to not the Top 40 music, which has been great for us to watch, because it makes it more interesting.

From my understanding of the process, you start a few months ahead of time, get a huge book of songs, and then place them throughout the season.

Ginsberg: We get a huge list from the production from James and his team. And we start by processing that and we reach out to the labels. At the same time, Sara, a solid month before we actually start, starts reaching out to our publishers, our labels — “The season is upcoming, send over what you’d like.”

She goes through them and listens to them flags to James and his team what she thinks might work or what might work. And then as we know what’s prioritized as they go into these episodes, we do these massive follow-ups saying, “OK, this is what we need. We need clearance on these because this is what they’re using.”

This show needs a solid amount of material pre-cleared so that they have that freedom. But as we get into the production, James realizes, “Oh, no, I need five more of these.” And so, we’re back out there doing it again.

James, Sara, what’s your turnaround time? You’re getting the final cut to place music and then it’s live in the world.

Barker: We’re on six nights a week, so the need for tracks is constant and daily. And I feel like this year, there’s one example that comes to my mind of working with Sara where I was like, “I need this song and it needs to be on tomorrow’s episode.” Normally the Hideaway [a segment of the show where Islanders are secluded in a romantic bungalow to test their connection] is something that we do later in the season. And this year, it was in episode one because new bombshells came in and we snuck away to the Hideaway.

I reached out to Sara and I was like, I need “Hideaway” by Kiesza. I just need it. It’s the perfect fit to open episode two, to call back to what we had done. And I mean, with working with Sara, it was one of the fastest syncs I think we’ve ever had.

Ginsberg: Yeah, I was surprised.

Tell us more about what Season Six did for you budget-wise and selection-wise, having folks like Charli XCX, Tate Mcrae, and Chappell Roan on the soundtrack. Did you see a very clear shift in public interest after the season?

Barker: Well, as someone who’s queer, it was always very important for me to have music that spoke more to that side of things. It is a very heteronormative show, and I love it; it’s awesome. But I think when we can get queer artists in there that appeal to maybe a different crowd than what the audience is used to listening to, that’s awesome. It is not a conscious goal, but something very important to me.

In the past it could have been like, “The really dramatic covers of songs were the thing you immediately associated with Love Island.” And it’s still very much a part of the ethos of what the Love Island music is. But last year, because the show was so popular and because we had some different music that we were playing with, it cracked open what people thought of as Love Island music, and we could play a little bit more. A freedom came with it in the choices that we would make. We could go a little ballsier: “OK, this is Chappell Roan singing a queer love song about a woman, but these are the universal lyrics in that.”

Last year, Rob and Andrea’s breakup was scored to “Kaleidoscope.” And I think it was just perfect for the moment, and that’s how we try to approach everything. At the end of Season Six, we had more freedom because we knew what we were doing and we knew that people trusted us, so then we could take bigger swings.

I think that has carried over into Season Seven, which is awesome. We’re trying to do some cool stuff. I think the Olivia Rodrigo sync of “Bad Idea Right,” which is such a more rock-y song, and it has a little bit more angst to it — using that for Ace and Chelley’s pie kiss in a recent episode, we sync that song and we hope for the best. We’re like, “There will be a moment where we finally get to use it.” And then the moment presented itself to us.

Meryl and Sara, what’s been the real-life shift to your work after Season Six? 

Torres:I definitely have more pitches, a lot of new people too, because of the last season. So just more and more music to go through and hopefully clear and hopefully get to use. I do feel bad when I reach out, especially to the independent artists, and say, “I’m personally a fan of yours. I would love to be able to give you an opportunity, but I can’t guarantee it.” We always keep trying for them.

Ginsberg: The TV business has really changed and the budgets are constantly being slashed, so it’s a bit of a tightrope for us… Because you would think, “Oh, our budget’s expanding.” But because TV is shrinking and shrinking, it’s a little bit of a thing for us to make it work within the confines of always-shrinking budgets.

It is a show with a lot of love in it. I have to say, working on the show, there’s a lot of love in the team, and the music that we do has a lot of love in it across the board. You can feel it in the clearances and everything. It’s really a great team.

When you see the couples form, do you start to build tones and sounds for each couple, or is it more based on the parts of the show, the Hideaways or movie night or challenges?

Barker: It’s never been based on a couple, because I think at its core, stories about love and heartbreak and tension or whatever, they’re all universal. We all experience it — straight, queer, or other. We all experience love in similar ways.

I think we do tend to have certain characters. We try to stay away from stereotypes and archetypes, because we don’t want to pigeonhole people, but I think when we knew Taylor was a part of the main cast [this season], we definitely looked for some country songs. Not that his POV or narrative would be country, but just to ground him in this world that is other for him.

But as you’ve seen, if you’ve been watching this season, we’re not using country songs to score every scene he’s in. It’s just having a few of them that when it’s important or key to the story we can go to. So I think that’s as close as we get to that.

The other big part of getting new stuff for us this year is we have constantly been trying to up our game with the challenges or the games that they play. And I think because of Sara’s and Meryl’s help, this year, we’ve had some custom covers made for us. Sara’s been working with this company called Champagne Breakfast, who’s incredible.

We knew that we were doing the Leather and Lace party, which had a dominatrix vibe to it. And we were like, “Well, we need S&M by Rihanna, but we need it Love Island-style.” And so, I wrote up a brief. Sara worked on it with Champagne Breakfast, went out and got it, and they found an artist within their wheelhouse and custom created it for us. That’s when you start getting into the perfect placement of song and creative. It has been a unique experience that really only started this year for us. 

Torres: Yeah. It’s very fun. And their artists are more than happy to create these covers. Again, they know it’s not guaranteed that it’ll be used, but we try even harder because we know they put in all the time to create the track. But we’ve had a few of them done so far. Hopefully we’ll place a couple more.

Barker: Oh, yeah. There’s one that we’ve got in our back pocket for the finale that literally gave me full-body chills, goosebumps, yesterday. I can’t wait until four or five weeks from now. It’s amazing!