Jocelyn Michelle Brown is a music supervisor who turned her nerd tendencies into a multifaceted career. In the time since her mother taught her how to make a mixtape with a dual-deck boombox more than 30 years ago, she’s worked as a music critic for a local Florida alt-weekly, a public relations coordinator for an indie label, a DJ, and now as a music supervisor. These days, she operates as the principal of Reality Club, a music consulting agency she founded three years ago. As a supervisor, she has advised on music for films like Pinball: The Man Who Saved the Game (2022), Ferguson Rises (2021), and others, helping determine the proper synergy between music and tonality for the projects. Here, she chats about the not-so-obvious TV theme that helped inspire her career path, her music listening habits, and more. 

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What things in your childhood led you to your career as a music supervisor?

The real origin starts with Jan Hammer’s Miami Vice theme. Miami Vice was a thing that my mom and I watched. No little kid should have been watching Miami Vice at this time, but it was the ’80s, and parents do what they want. Whenever I heard those initial notes, I'd come tearing outta wherever I was. 

There’s this game that is popular in preschools called Memory, and it revolves around flashcards and pairing up images relative to those flashcards. That’s kind of what was going on with me relative to hearing that theme song and knowing [what was on the screen when] the percussion came in, where you'd hear the guitar solo; parts where things would amp up, where things would ramp down. I was pairing all of those sounds to the images that were flashing. And my mom, God bless her, she'd be like, “Who's that?” And I'm like, “Lieutenant Castillo.” What's that? Speedboat. What is that? That's a flamingo. My life as a music supervisor is really funny, that fundamental pairing of sound and image is still very much a thing. I've just always thought musically in that way, even when there's no image in front of me that exists in my mind, I'm seeing something and creating an entire story there. 

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Helping curate music for a show or movie is undeniably cool. What’s your favorite part about the job?

It's that Rubik's Cube element. It's solving a problem musically, right? For me, it's looking at what the director is aiming for or what the brand client is aiming for, and presenting them with options. There's always a moment where I can go with the expected thing that is being asked for, or I can introduce them to something that's a little outside the box that also meets their ask. And I get to be the person who walks them through that and explains, “I know you're attached to this Minnie Riperton song and it's wonderful, but it's also overused. Here's a new artist who's reminiscent vocally, but doing some different things that I think might be a little more relatable to your audience. And her new album comes out in two weeks, right around the time when your campaign is expected to drop.”

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Before you worked as a music supervisor, you worked at a radio station and then as a DJ. How did those jobs prepare you for what you do now?

I would say the radio station figured in in terms of knowledge of catalog, learning about which record labels had which artists and specialized in which things, what [artist] backstories were, how they connected to other artists, other collaborators. 

DJing, however, was a little different in that you're there in a bar, you're observing social interactions, you're observing what people respond to and what they don't respond to, and really able to read emotion and feeling and tonality. If someone's talking to you or coming up to you or complimenting what you do or making a request or outright telling you they hate what you do—which did happen sometimes—you're able to really register all those ranges of emotion and response. And to me, I took that with me into my job to let that inform how I thought about [taste, as in] I know I like this, but is Debbie in Nebraska going to respond to this? When I put this song in a commercial for McDonald's, is the creative team gonna respond to it? It's rarely about me. It's more about, what are people gonna respond to? What do I know people have responded to? 

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For your job, you have to provide and advise creative teams on the music to choose for films and TV series. Has having to listen to music so critically for a job changed how you listen to music for leisure? 

I can't not notice it [laughs]. Every time I go to the movies, I have to stick around for the end credits just to see who worked on what. But that's to satisfy my own personal curiosity and to write people and give kudos when they've done something really cool. There's no way for me to watch something now without observing what happens musically. In terms of my casual listening, yeah, it does change things a little bit. If I were to be completely honest about what I choose to listen to in my spare time, man, lately it's been a fair amount of ambient [laughs], a fair amount of instrumental music that is not jazz. Sometimes, [it’s] just straight-up proto punk, like the Stooges or Death. Stuff like that doesn't cross my desk so much relative to the publishing realm or music supervision realm. Because for me, that's a pocket of interest that I need to protect. I need to still be able to connect to music as a fan.

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What’s something that you think needs to change in the world of music supervision?

There aren't a whole lot of music supervisors of color who are looked at for a lot of jobs. I hope that changes because we are here. We're not necessarily seen, we're not necessarily heard, but we are very much here. And that's literally across every ethnic group that you can see. There are Middle Eastern music supervisors, Latin music supervisors, African American music supervisors, AAPI music supervisors. We are here, we want that work. We're doing the work to get the work, but we're not necessarily the people who get called into the room. I want that noted because there's a perception that we're not there, and we are. We are.

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By the time Backstreet Boys’ Millennium was released in May 1999, the music industry was up to its neck in teen idols. A few years prior, acts like BSB, Spice Girls, and NSYNC had opened the proverbial floodgates for a new generation of talented young pop stars, with artists like Britney Spears and Christina Aguilera emerging a short while later. The fandom for them delighted label execs, and soon a river of similarly fresh-faced performers was flowing. 

BBMAK never had a song as big as “I Want It That Way,” but their 1999 single “Back Here” remains an underappreciated Top 40 gem. Ireland-based quartet B*Witched never became as big as Spice Girls, but "C'est La Vie” brims with optimism and sprightly bounce that evokes pantheon teen pop (and it sold over 3 million copies worldwide). And though 98 Degrees are properly designated as a Second String Boy Band, there’s no shame in having been even in the same league as BSB and NSYNC. Their “I Do” is a romantic ballad at its unashamed best. 

These B-team artists range from genuinely talented to enjoyably corny, and in the shadow of the Britneys, Justins, and Christinas, they found a measure of spotlight.

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The dance-music auteur known as Afriqua has plenty of story to tell. He was born Adam Longman Parker in Virginia and educated at the Royal Academy of Music in London. A classically trained pianist, he managed to place in the DMC DJ world championship when he was just 12 years old. His works—a stylish blend of house, disco, and techno—pay homage to his Black heritage, and they’ve made him a distinct voice in the world of electronic music. Currently signed to R&S Records, he made his Mutek debut in 2022, and can frequently be found DJing around his hometown of Berlin, including the illustrious Panorama Bar. This May, he'll release the EP Maxi Single, a gleaming constellation of dance-floor thrills. 

In this Q&A, Parker — who became a Third Bridge client this year — talks to us about how he connects with the people who love his music, why he thinks opening up about his creative process deepens that connection, and why keeping his professional biography up to date is as important for him as it is for his fans. 

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One of the hardest parts about making music for a living is finding out where your fans are and how to reach them. How did you find yours?

For me, it was really trial and error, and it remains so. I'm doing my market research in public. When I was younger, it was just a matter of, “I’m making music, I want to put it out and let's see what happens.” And then I was able to see from that, “Okay, well these are the DJs who like my stuff, these are the radio stations that like my stuff.” Social media gives this really amazing, detailed look into the characters and the sort of scenes that really [click] with you. But you really never know what people are going to totally resonate with, especially if you're taking creative risks.

So then I think a lot of the art becomes getting more data in a way that is on brand. So figuring out a way to kind of like, tease stuff or tease ideas and get kind of constant feedback from your fans in a way that doesn't water down your brand or undermine your quality. For me, that's been recently doing more videos and stuff on social media, because it gives me a chance to say, "All right, I made this track and maybe this track is never gonna come out, but I can do a cool video around it and tease it." I deepen my relationship with my fans because they are part of the creative process. 

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What do you think is the most important thing for you or any other artist to communicate to fans? 

I think that people learn a lot more from seeing how you go about your creative process than they do from the resulting work, especially now. You might have a song that pops on Spotify just algorithmically, but nobody knows who you are. I think what really distinguishes an artist nowadays—and I say this as an artist but also as a fan of so many artists—is giving people something to invest in, in terms of the story behind the work. Because I think that [it's important] for fans to recognize that their feedback is an essential part of the process of creating art. 

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Let's talk about album rollouts and music promotion. When putting together your album covers, your press releases, or anything else, what do you think is the most important thing to consider? 

I think the most important thing to consider is the tone. It’s very easy for the content tangential to the release of a piece of music to get out of your control and end up being totally off-brand with what you're actually trying to express. And the hard thing about it is, it could be exactly the [right] information, but just presented in the wrong way.

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Obviously, your music is personal, and it says a lot about you, but there’s a different kind of journey when you don’t use a lot of lyrics to tell your story. With that in mind, how important do you think it is to have a bio that really says what you’re about? 

Instinctively I feel like it's something that's always been missing from my operation. It's always been a bit of an afterthought, like, “Oh shit, we need a bio. Oh shit, the bio needs to be updated.” The further you get into your career, the more difficult it is to really sum it up. And I kind of want a nicely written bio for myself, as well, to just remember what I've done. 

It can be difficult to keep that sort of throughline for your own career when you do so much. And when you start to get to a point where you're constantly busy with different projects, with different people, [it's necessary] to really make the decision of what's important, and what actually needs to be represented and what are the key principles that bring your project to life. I think that having all of that stuff written properly is invaluable when you're trying to keep multiple stakeholders and press aligned.

I used to have the thought, earlier in my career, that people would take the press release and I thought they would dive deeper and they would come up with their own interpretation. I don't wanna count on anyone anymore to get my story across. I wanna tell my story, and know that whatever people are working with, based on the story that I'm telling, at least my story has been told fully from my perspective. I think that's an artist's responsibility, you know?

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‍Interested in working with Third Bridge to help tell your story? We create a variety of editorial and marketing materials for the artist and label community. Hit us up if you'd like to discuss your project.