Thank you so much for putting your two cents in! You should start writing a blog yourself!

You’re absolutely right: too many colleagues aren’t treating their profession as a business, but they’re not the only artists making that mistake. I know voice-over talents who spend most of their days chasing after $100 gigs from pay-to-play sites while they’re neglecting their own marketing. You did give them some hope, though, and it’s good to hear that it’s still possible to land a job, even if you’re audition is at the back of the line.

Stay in touch with Double Dutch!

I spent a few months on Voice123 and although I booked a couple of small jobs (each of which has since come back for additional work, I’m happy to add) the restrictions/rules associated with their “voicecaster” automated software drove me crazy. But they at least do overtly limit the number of auditions accepted for a given project.

Voices.com scares me with their auditions received statistic (often over 200!) But last week I was selected for a decent job, and on the job’s “Overview” page, it showed I was audition 87/147. So at least anecdotally, I can say it looks like you can be more than 50 and still get heard.

Paul, GREAT BLOG.

Too many of us creative types really do pretend this is not a business and, in many ways, a numbers game. Here’s the number I’ve been afraid to calculate for myself, but Richard’s reference to 100 auditions and your recent post about auditions lost in cyberspace move moe closer to calculating it:

{(Dollars earned in VO)-[(Dollars spent on membership sites)+(Dollars spent in escrow fees, etc.)]

DIVIDED BY

[(Hours Spent Searching for Jobs)+(Hours Spent Auditioning)+(Hours Spent Working)]

As the economy has soured, I’ve found myself trying to maintain my earning level by working more and more hours – and I include the project search in those hours. I’m just afraid of what that final hourly income figure might be!

Keep up the great work.

Maybe they do not collect that data now or currently have a method to collect that data (which seems to be a mind-boggling oversight bordering on incompetence), but if they don’t have that data or a method to collect it, they need to develop a method to gather that data to properly serve their paying customers.

Because my day job is working for a company that specializes in data collection and analysis, I know that we’d consider developing such a method trivial – within certain parameters of reliability. The people auditioning deserve to know the track records of the people they make auditions for….

BTW – AFTRA/SAG still has a rate for doing demos. AFTRA/SAG talent are not supposed to be doing demos for free.

I’m a radio vet with 20+ years experience, major markets, known voice, wanted to make some extra cash with VO’s. When I first joined voices.com in 2007, I became a premium member via a special discount offer they had for a limited period. There were two tiers of membership then: Premium, and the free one. Of course, the main promise of Premium membership was that your profile and voice would be visible to clients before the free members were. Premium was the top tier, and I booked 3 or 4 jobs in fairly rapid succession in my first month. I thought, great, piece of cake.

Within a few months of my joining, voices.com offered up their new, exclusive “Platinum” membership. This cost ten times more per year than what I already paid (my “special” rate was 100 bucks a year for two years, the Platinum was 1000 per year). The “platinum” members suddenly became first tier as “Talents”, and I was relegated to mere “people” status. When my bookings fell to exactly zero that month, they stayed there, despite my auditioning for dozens and dozens of jobs. The sound of crickets chirping became the dominant noise from my inbox. I have not made a single booking on voices.com since mid 2008, despite gussying up my page and putting in more demos as the nice folks there suggested (they are nice), and submitting what are certainly more than 100 auditions.

I was told by another VO friend that all these sites actually have limits now, that they DON’T tell the talents about. She said that voices.com actually stops sending clients auditions after the first 50 submitted, so as not to “overwhelm” them because the number of auditioners has grown exponentially. So any sent after those first fifty make it in do indeed fall into a black hole, and are never even put before the client. I would love to hear some confirmation or denial of this from anyone else. My friend also said the only way to ever book a job is to hover over the site at 6AM or something and immediately race to complete auditions QUICK as SOON as they post, and if you’re lucky you’ll slip under the wire and be among those first fifty. But you have to somehow know when that magic time to hover is, as they won’t post it.

So it seems to me to be double jeopardy here for folks like me, double dutch. Thats why I’m glad to have a REAL agent now. Decades ago, I was told that anyone that makes you pay up front for representation is b*******. That may not have been the case when voices.com hit the market, but thats sure what I’m smelling now, unfortunately.

Again, I would love to hear anyone else comment on this. And thank you for this forum, by the way.

Best,

Richard