Behind every Instagram ad, commercial, or TV trailer you see, there is a fierce battle over what song will get to play in the background. Music sync is one of the last places where independent artists can still make money, but it’s an increasingly crowded field. Meet the Syncmaster, Katie Jelen, who’s fighting to get their songs placed.
Music Citizens is supported in part by the Tennessee Arts Commission and the First Horizon Foundation.
This episode was produced by Emily Siner, Justin Barney and Jason Moon Wilkins. Mixing and Mastering by Michael Pollard. Scoring by Jay Ragsdale. Special thanks to Tony Gonzalez, Jewly Hight, Celia Gregory, Megan Jones, Leigh Mayo, Carly Butler, Stephanie O’Byrne, and everyone who helped.
Transcript
Justin Barney (reporter): Jason.
Jason Moon Wilkins (host): Yes.
Justin Barney: Are you ready to play a game?
Jason Moon Wilkins: Sure. Can I win?
Justin Barney: Yes. OK. So, when someone is making a commercial or directing a TV show, they often want to have music playing in the background that really brings the visuals to life.
Jason Moon Wilkins: This is a whole business called music sync.
Justin Barney: Right. And so they write up a brief of what kind of song they’re looking for, and they send the briefs out to music sync reps like Katie Jelen.
Katie Jelen: You know, we want a song that is bright and bubbly, that has a certain BPM. Male vocal, female vocal, genre.
Justin Barney: Katie Jelen owns her own company, Honestly Good Music. She has a roster of independent musicians who want to get those spots. And so we are going to read through a brief. And then we are going to hear the songs that Katie picked, and we’re gonna see if you can pick the song that ultimately made it into the ad.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Okay.
Katie Jelen: “We’re pulling together tracks for an online campaign for a household beverage brand. We need fresh, uptempo modern tracks that capture the feeling of power, both lyrically and sonically. This word must appear in the lyric. Tone: confident, energetic, and modern. Not loud or aggressive. Should feel sleek, digital, and current. Fits the CGI visuals. No stadium rock or big sports anthem vibes.”
Justin Barney (to Katie): So must say power.
Katie Jelen: Yes. And so all of these have “power” in the hook.
Justin Barney: So one thing that really amazed me is how much work happens for free. The artist that Katie works with, they make all the songs ahead of time in hopes that they will get the placement
Katie Jelen: So this first one is called Power by Mejia. So there you go. So that’s powered by Mejia.
Justin Barney: So that was song one. Let’s, let’s do song two.
Katie Jelen: This next one is I Got the Power by Elena Cross.
Justin Barney: What’d you think about that one?
Jason Moon Wilkins: I like the first one better, but it’s darker. This is, like, major beverage brand. How dark do they want to go?
Katie Jelen: And then this one’s Unleash the Power, which is the artist Mayland.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I mean, surely that was the one, right? I mean, like me personally, not my favorite, but God, that sounds like a commercial for something. You know?
Justin Barney: Let’s keep in mind, we listened to three songs. Katie would love if this music supervisor was getting only three songs. But this music supervisor also sent the brief to 40 other sync reps like Katie, who are gonna send her 10 songs. And so ultimately there’s gonna be 500 songs that this music supervisor is going to choose. And the one that they went with…
Jason Moon Wilkins: It was song one. Hey, that was my favorite!
Justin Barney: That was your favorite!
Katie Jelen: We saw it premiere during the Olympics following the Super Bowl on Sunday, which was very exciting. It’s amazing that anything makes it onto television, honestly. Like every placement is a miracle.
Jason Moon Wilkins: This is Music Citizens. I’m your host, Jason Moon Wilkins.
Justin Barney: I’m your reporter, Justin Barney. This is episode six: Katie Jelen, the Syncmaster. Every time you see a commercial, every time you see an Instagram ad or a TV show, there is a fierce battle going on for what song is picked. And when you hear a song in a commercial for a Google Pixel or a trailer for a TV show, like Billions, you might be hearing her work. But the fight has gotten much harder in recent years.
Katie Jelen: It’s gotten so competitive and people have gotten so cutthroat.
Justin Barney: She’s competing against the biggest pop stars, and she’s also competing against the cheapest music libraries. And soon she might be competing with AI. And so this kind of golden age of sync that we’ve had could be collapsing.
Justin Barney: So this episode is about music sync. How would you describe music sync?
Jason Moon Wilkins: Music synchronization. It is the act of synchronizing music to film, tv, video games. Truly, that’s at the base, core of it. That’s the mechanics. And then there’s the business of who selects those songs for synchronization? Who is pitching those songs and who’s creating those songs?
Justin Barney: And Katie Jelen is one of those people. She’s not at the top. She’s not an artist who’s making it. She’s working between the musician and the person who ultimately picks the song.
Justin Barney (to Katie): I am way out here in West Nashville, at Katie’s home studio. Good morning. Hello! How does your day start?
Katie Jelen: Typically I’m in my pajamas right now. Um, I did get dressed today ’cause you guys were coming. Um, but yes, the truth is I’m usually closing deals in my pajamas.
Justin Barney: Many of our other subjects for Music Citizens, they have very physical jobs.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yeah.
Justin Barney: Owner of a venue, vinyl presser, piano tuner. This is the first time that we’re doing a desk job,
Jason Moon Wilkins: Which is most of the jobs.
Justin Barney: Katie sits down at her kitchen table, we open up her laptop.
Katie Jelen: Our clients are music supervisors. Whenever they reach out to us, that kind of dictates our days.
Justin Barney: She’s literally waiting for the emails to find her well, and those emails are coming in from music supervisors who are sending briefs.
Madeline Dowling: The brief will say how much money we have. What kind of terms we’ll have for the agreement, but then most importantly it’s the creative elements.
Justin Barney: Madeline Dowling, music supervisor.
Madeline Dowling: We always say that music tells the viewer how to feel about what they’re seeing.
Katie Jelen: Music a lot of times is selling the spot. You know, they want an earworm, you know, they want something that’s interesting that’s gonna grab someone’s attention because they know that most people are sitting on their phone.
Justin Barney: People hate ads. You don’t wanna watch ’em. You’re resisting it. But then if a song can win you over — a song is a feeling. And if you can have that feeling, get somebody excited, which will then get ’em to buy the thing, that’s why there’s still money there.
Jason Moon Wilkins: The kind of money we’re talking about is a massive range. Super Bowl ads, that can be upwards of $2 million, but an Instagram ad can be as little as 200 bucks. In the middle there you’ve got something like a Netflix TV show, which is generally in the one to $30,000 range. Sync really is one of the last places in music where artists are making good money. There is a whole group of them, especially in Nashville, who make their money exclusively on sync. Sometimes with several different artist identities.
Justin Barney: So interestingly, when I was recording with Katie, Katie’s husband is a producer and he was doing a co-writing session with that artist Mejia, AKA Annalisa Franklin upstairs.
Annalisa Franklin: I have these different avenues just sonically. Um, probably the most well known, um, is Baby Frankie and it’s very bubbly, kind of feisty girl rap. And then I have Mejia. I just think it’s a huge gift if in this day and age you can support yourself doing music exclusively. And that is something I’m lucky enough to say.
Jason Moon Wilkins: But that is getting harder and harder to do.
Justin Barney: That’s coming up, after the break.
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Justin Barney: There’s always been music in movies, in advertisements. There were jingle houses. There, there was the double mint gum song.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I can sing the Mun-chee cheese song if you would like.
Justin Barney: Right. And because advertisements had these hokey jingles, I mean — you were in a band in the nineties.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yeah, a few. Yes.
Justin Barney: At that time, what did you think if someone had offered to put your band song in an ad on TV?
Jason Moon Wilkins: That would mean the death of your band in 1995.
Justin Barney: Why?
Jason Moon Wilkins: Because there was this idea of credibility and sincerity. And to your point, did you want your music aligned in the minds of listeners with Wendy’s? No. You didn’t want that. And you would get crucified by your peers and by the critics.
Justin Barney: Right.
Jason Moon Wilkins: But I have a very distinct memory when the mood changed — and that was when the Shins, early 2000s, had a song in a McDonald’s commercial.
Play Shins song
Jason Moon Wilkins: And it was as, you know — post-Napster, music business in disarray, we’re all trying to figure everything out. And I think at first it was like, what are they doing? And then it was, did you hear how much money? Then it was, oh this is a shrewd business move.
Justin Barney: We’re talking about the early two thousands, the advent of the internet. And there’s more music from independent artists than ever before. And advertising becomes a way for people to discover music.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yes.
Justin Barney: Like with the Apple iPad commercials. Jet? “Are You Gonna Be My Girl”?
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yeah. Jet was a huge one.
Justin Barney: Feist, “1 2 3 4.” And then in TV, everybody pinned the culture shift singularly to Grey’s Anatomy.
Jason Moon Wilkins: This I know well. Because at that time, this is what, 2005? I had friends, they might struggle to get 50 people to come to their show at the OG basement, but Grey’s Anatomy just paid them lots of zeroes. Oh man. So many friends who, uh, they bought me drinks ’cause of Grey’s Anatomy.
Lynn Grossman: Grey’s Anatomy was everything when I started to do sync. That was sort of the holy grail. If you were to get a song on there, your notoriety would jump incredibly the next day.
Justin Barney: I was talking to Lynn Grossman, who was the owner of Secret Road, a sync placement company. She told this story about Ingrid Michelson being placed on the season finale.
Lynn Grossman: And then the next day we got a call saying that it was going to be the actual end of the entire season episode. And they had taken a four-minute song or three-minute song and elongated it into six minutes. It was the scene where Christina walks out on her wedding and is ripping off her wedding dress. And it’s to Ingrid’s song “Keep Breathing” for six minutes.
Justin Barney: Wow.
Lynn Grossman: And then the day after that she was the number one and number two most-searched item in the country. One was the name of her song and the other was her name. Um, and she was a relatively unknown artist two days before, so it was kind of incredible.
Jason Moon Wilkins: For Ingrid Michelson, that becomes — she gets a career, she gets placed on festivals, she gets booked. It was a huge turning point for her.
Justin Barney: So Secret Road, Grey’s Anatomy, suddenly the indie space is open.
Justin Barney (to Lynn): And how many other sync companies were doing that kind of thing?
Lynn Grossman: From what I know, maybe four.
Justin Barney (to Lynn): And how many are doing stuff like that now?
Lynn Grossman: Maybe a hundred.
Justin Barney: One of those hundred or so companies is owned by one of Lynn’s own proteges, Katie Jelen. Katie’s origin story is so great. She started as a performer and then realized that she didn’t wanna be a performer.
Katie Jelen: Realized that I hated being in the spotlight.
Justin Barney: And so she did the logical thing that anybody would do.
Katie Jelen: And I enrolled in law school.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Sure. ‘
Justin Barney: Cause she’s like, it’s gonna be handy She moves to LA, she takes the bar, she fails the bar. And so she sees an ad from Secret Road.
Katie Jelen: This old, two-year expired internship listing.
Justin Barney: And she sends Lynn Grossman an email.
Katie Jelen: The fact that she even saw my email was a miracle. She’s, like, not great at emails.
Justin Barney: And Lynn is like, you can have an internship. We really like you. The problem is you’re graduated and we can’t give you credit, and we’re afraid that you’re gonna sue us.
Katie Jelen: But if you can figure out a workaround, you know, we’d love to figure it out.
Justin Barney: And so Katie, in her very first act as a non-legal lawyer…
Katie Jelen: I used my very expensive law degree and drafted a contract.
Justin Barney: Ensuring that she will not get paid and also will not sue for the work that she is doing.
Jason Moon Wilkins: She used her degree!
Katie Jelen: But it, you know, got me in the door.
Justin Barney: So she starts with Secret Road. Secret Road is growing. Competitors are expanding. And then eventually she gets a job at Warner Chappel. And she made some very, um, life-changing ads.
MUSIC: Let’s talk about bacon cheese. Let’s talk about mustard, please. Let’s talk about all the toppings, veggie choppings … Add some red potatoes, mustard pepper too, because it’s creamy potato salad from a summer barbecue…
Jason Moon Wilkins: Wow. If you want a reminder of why artists were hesitant to jump into this space. Are you gonna do what with my song?
Justin Barney: And so she’s working at Warner. Warner is like, Oh, all this stuff is happening in Nashville. A lot of the artists, a lot of the sync artists were happening in Nashville.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Right.
Justin Barney: And they hired Katie to be here.
Katie Jelen: I would honestly venture to say, I think Nashville probably has the biggest community of creatives that work in sync out of any other, um, music city.
Justin Barney: Because Nashville has a lot of career musicians.
Jason Moon Wilkins: You have people who discover, man, maybe the road’s not for me. Or they wanna start a family. So what is this other thing I can continue to do that is creative that I’m using my skills to do? It became like a legitimate side hustle to supplement the artist’s career.
Justin Barney: For a lot of artists, it became this thing where you could just do that. You can just do sync.
Katie Jelen: Um, so, you know, that lasted for quite a while. I mean, I would say 2015 to 2018 was like gangbusters. Um, I’ve heard. I didn’t have my own company then. I wish I did.
Justin Barney: And then COVID happens. And in COVID, no one’s touring, no one’s making money. Literally the only place where artists can make money is in sync.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Truly.
Katie Jelen: I was working at Warner at the time and it was really fascinating to watch it kind of unfold in real time. Because a lot of major artists, when their tours got pulled and they have, you know, maybe hundreds of people on salary to support these global tours and no longer have income coming in, they started freaking out. Major acts were like, anything you can get us, we don’t care.
Justin Barney: They are taking less for these contracts than they ever would have before.
Katie Jelen: And then at that point I was like, oh, this has changed.
Justin Barney: This is when Katie opened her own indie sync company.
Katie Jelen: I tell our creatives, you know, we need to sonically compete with what the majors are doing, but just in a little bit more of an affordable way.
Justin Barney: But then she’s also competing with something even more affordable, which is music libraries.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yeah. The libraries have entered the chat.
Justin Barney: The libraries have entered the chat, who are just making like background music and so now you have high, medium, low, kind of like all intersecting and all fighting for the same space. There’s so much saturation and there’s so much competition and there’s a lot of sync going on, but it’s less of the big hits, it’s less of the Grey’s Anatomy and more a 30-second Instagram ad that’s gonna run for two weeks.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yeah. And those contracts are much lower.
Justin Barney: It’s really hard to make a living if you’re going to choose the path.
Jason Moon Wilkins: And at this moment there is a looming question that could impact that path for everybody. I’m talking about AI. Because — how does AI work? You’re putting in, you know, a brief and it’s going to put something out the other side and that seems very similar to the way that sync already works.
Justin Barney: Okay. Jason?
Jason Moon Wilkins: Yes, sir.
Justin Barney: I have a second game for us to play.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I fear this game.
Justin Barney: So we’re doing all this speculation about AI and how it’s going to possibly affect music sync. Let’s just do it. Let’s just, let’s just take the brief, we’ll put it into AI and we’ll see what it comes out with.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Okay.
Justin Barney: Right now in music syn, I didn’t talk to anybody who was like, I’m using AI. But I did talk to a couple people who were like, there’s kind of a “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Oh, people don’t want to talk about it, but songwriters, demo makers, producers, they are utilizing this technology. Let’s do it.
Justin Barney: Let’s do it. We’re gonna put the brief into Suno and see what happens. This is the brief that Katie got for the Power Aid commercial.
Katie Jelen: We need fresh, uptempo modern tracks that capture the feeling of power. This word must appear in the lyric. Tone: confident, energetic, and modern. Should feel sleek, digital, and current. Fits the CGI visuals. No stadium rock or big sports anthem vibes.
Justin Barney: So are we ready?
Jason Moon Wilkins: Sure.
Justin Barney: I’m pressing Create. It’s thinking, it’s making, it’s doing whatever it is that AI does. I see a bunch of spinny wheels. Upgrade for full song. We won’t need that.
Jason Moon Wilkins: It’s a 30-second commercial. We don’t need a full song.
Justin Barney: Okay. The first song that comes up is called Power On My Tongue.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I think I hurt myself.
Justin Barney: Okay, I’m gonna press play.
Jason Moon Wilkins: Holy shit. Whoa, whoa, whoa. I feel hope draining out of me.
Justin Barney: Oh my God. I thought it was just gonna be slop. I thought it was gonna be unintelligible. I thought it was gonna be barely music. That is a song.
Jason Moon Wilkins: It’s an actual song that sounds like a human, and the words made sense. The chorus was catchy.
Justin Barney: I mean, honestly I thought that this game was gonna be fun.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I told you I feared the game.
Justin Barney: I thought we were gonna come out and say, oh, well look at that. We’re all speculation, we’re all fear mongering and we put it into AI and we came out with crap. That’s scary.
Jason Moon Wilkins: And that was the free version.
Justin Barney: I talked to Katie’s husband who’s a producer. As a musician, he was like, why would I use AI to make a song? That’s the fun part. That’s the part that I wanna do. And I was like, I see that. I think that’s a good point.
Jason Moon Wilkins: I think that’s the best point.
Justin Barney: But I’m sorry to say it, but the people who want the music aren’t gonna ask you to make it. They’re gonna be the ones that make it. They’re looking to cut out middlemen.
Jason Moon Wilkins: And if the bottom line is money and you’re gonna save $10,000 by pushing a button, you’re gonna push that button.
Que Parks: It’s like, wow. Like if a company really wanted to do that, what’s stopping them?
Justin Barney: I wanna tell you about Q Parks. He’s a Nashville hip hop artist. He’s made, like, 200 songs for sync, he’s got like 20 placements.
Que Parks: I went full throttle doing sync because at the time I wasn’t, I’ve never got a single penny from, from just my personal music.
Justin Barney: I was like, what do you think about ai? He was like, who’s stopping anybody from making a song like me?
Jason Moon Wilkins: No one is.
Justin Barney: No one is. But then I talked to Katie and she didn’t feel the same way about AI. And in fact, the reason that she doesn’t, involves a story with Que Parks. So Katie knows the music supervisor on the show Billions.
Katie Jelen: And when they were looking for the song for the trailer for the final season, um, we had sent a bunch of music and didn’t get it. Went away. A month later, I got this song turned in from an artist that we work with, Que Parks. And the moment I heard the song, I was like, this is the song for Billions. ’cause I’d watched every season, like I knew the energy of the show, I knew the characters. And I reached out to the supervisor and said, you know, I’m sure this is long gone. But I just got this song in and I think that this is the song. And he goes, oh my God, you’re right. And it became the song for the trailer. You know, I had watched the show, I knew the energy of it. Like that’s not something you’re gonna read in a brief. Like that’s the human kind of connection and experience. And that’s not something that AI can do.
Credits
Jason: Music Citizens is a project of WNXP and Nashville Public Radio.
Justin: Thank you to our sync experts Lynn Grossman
Jason: Artists Que Parks…And Annalisa Franklin
Justin: Thank you Madeline Dowling, for the special help
Jason: And, of course, thank you to our subject Katie Jelen
Justin: Throughout the episode, you heard some (very short) clips from Ingrid Michaelson, Feist and Jet, Mejia, Elena Cross, Mayland, and The Shins
Jason: None of our sync music was done by AI, scoring by the very human Jay Ragsdale
Justin: But thank you for that one song, Suno
Jason: Mixing and Mastering by Michael Pollard
Justin: Music Citizens was created by JMW, (back and forth)
Jason: And was reported and produced by Justin Barney
Justin: Thank you to the brains behind this operation, producer and editor Emily Siner. Thank you Emily.
Jason: Thanks to the ears and ideas of Jewly Hight, Celia Gregory, Megan Jones and Leigh Mayo
Justin: WNXP socials and landing page help from Carly Butler
Jason: Thanks to everyone at WNXP and Nashville Public Radio
Justin: And this would not happen without institutional support from Tennessee Arts Commission and the First Horizon Foundation
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