So I was watching season 5 of Silver Spoons on Antenna TV today and I never had seen the later seasons of this show and wasn't born until the tail end of the 80s but it surprised me to hear that both shows shared the same intro/outro music from 1986-7. You know, the bell music that The Facts of Life had in season 7, 8 and 9. They must've shared the same composer. I thought this was so weird that two shows would share the same intro/outro music. This was 1986/1987 so I'm not sure how common this was.

Yeah, I noticed that too.

Haha - I noticed that too. It’s pretty odd and I suspect that if Silver Spoons had still been on NBC at the time, NBC wouldn’t have allowed it. But that final season of SS played in first-run syndication in some pretty low profile slots. In our market, those fifth season episodes never got a weekly time slot - they were just added to the weekday, late-afternoon episode rotation alongside the earlier seasons, with no fanfare.

Re-using the same incidental music helped keep the budget down.

I believe both shows were being produced by Embassy Television by that time. So it most certainly saved them money to recycle the interstitial music, but it certainly takes the viewer out of the show, to hear the same music used on different shows.

Producers should know better than to do this, since it breaks the "feel" of a show (imagine hearing the sax music from Roseanne used on Masterpiece and you will understand why this should never happen, even in an attempt to save money).