The World Doesn’t Need Another Voice Actor

Today, 50,000 people for no particular reason will decide to become voice actors. They have been told by a few people that they have nice voices. Which translated means someone who isn’t in any related business nor has any background to support you or make an experienced suggestion thinks you sound like a million out of work radio d.j.’s   My advice is that if Steven Spielberg or the head creative director for a major ad agency or someone similar says they think you should be doing voiceover, get their number and by all means consider it.

Thousands of people from all sorts of 9 to 5 segments of the employment, most notably banking and finance (but inclusive of hundreds of fields) are finding themselves laid off and without any job prospects. So rather than waste their time going out and working on updating their skills sets and making themselves marketable, they fall for the old “Want to become an overnight millionaire success In voiceover, it’s easy and we’ll show you step by step…”

Add to that the thousands of people in radio who have lost their jobs , but have no problem hanging a shingle out that says “voiceover actor”. There is a new county in New Jersey being built entirely upon landfill made from the demo CD’s of radio dj’s, collectively known for the most part as “Dear God who makes these horrible sounding commercials” Again, there are some exceptions and several who do incredible work, but for the most part this group isn’t representative of those making it in v.o.

There are indeed quite a few rich people in voiceover. Most of them are teachers, coaches, sell books or products, personal manage, brand you as a voice actor and so on. Some of these people are darn nice and knowledgeable and others are clearly in it for the money. But is it worth any amount of money for any of them.

Suppose I asked you if you were willing to spend a minimum of 6 months and $5,000 to prepare for a career in an industry where less than 5% of its participants who have been in it for over a year will make more than $5,000 annually. How excited would this make you? Suppose I further went on to tell you that once you discarded the well known celebrities, less that ½ of 1% of the people who have been in this industry for over 2 years will make over $35,000.

Welcome to voiceover; an industry that is very misunderstood and tends to be over glamorized.

Here’s how it works. 10,000 people go out and embark upon voiceover careers. Some simply consider it an extension of some other “profession” and don’t bother to learn anything new. Others will buy some book or instructional CD and read to page 28 or listen for 27 minutes and then decide to enter the business. Some will study with every teacher they can find and spend thousands of dollars. Others will find a peer group online who will lie to them about how good they sound. Or perhaps the peer group just doesn’t really know what something should sound like.

But when it’s all said and done, perhaps 10 or so of the 10,000 will wind up with some sort of viable “career” in voiceover. Quite often 1 or 2 of them will exhibit some incredible chops that will open up doors, while the other 8 or 9 will have the good fortune of being married to producers or directors or work for an ad agency or perhaps just be in the right place at the right time. The 9,090 people who don’t make it will be far too embarrassed to ever speak of their failures and thus to the casual observer it simply appears that another 10 people have successfully entered into the field of v.o.

That is the short story. Some people will seem to want to hang on forever. Siphoning off money from their parents, retirement accounts, second mortgages and so forth, rather than admit defeat. Others will get thrown an occasional bone by a voice teacher to keep them interested and spending money. The paths are not straight and the stories too varied to provide a defining scenario, but the simple truth is that 6 weeks in welding school is not only cheaper, but a far surer road to riches.

I have counseled people who have lost their homes and marriages because they didn’t know when to quit and I have indeed seen the underbelly of this business, with actors trying to steal clients from other actors via Facebook friends or LinkedIn. And it can get worse than that. 

One very well known actor used to comment on my posts and say that I was negative and that nobody should be allowed to bust anyone’s dreams or tell them they shouldn’t go for it and cites his own journey in voiceover as an example.  Please, please don’t take this as my trying to burst anyone’s bubble, but simply my way of asking people to think about the consequences and to realize that this isn’t all unicorns and cotton candy. By the way this actor who likes to tell me I’m negative makes far more money from teaching than he does from voiceover, which perhaps should make him a little less credible. I personally work with 50 or so actors per month and I never charge them a dime. He’s also in Los Angeles, which makes a huge difference. The work for the most part is in L.A. and New York. You can live in Pittsburgh, but as wise man once said, if you want to catch fish you better drop your bait in some water.

Lest this post seem duplicitous or cause anyone to think “he’s only writing this because he doesn’t want the competition”, let me explain that there was a vast difference entering the voiceover field 20+ years ago vs. today. And to add to that, if I were looking at just starting my career today, I probably wouldn’t have made it past 18 months and with little to show for it.

When I started, actors took regular acting classes and improvisational acting classes. There wasn’t much in the way of actual voiceover classes, although I did take a few. Concepts such as understanding the structure of auditioning and mic technique and so forth were important then as they are now. Much else that is being taught in voiceover classes can be debated for overall importance and value. “Performing jingles for commercials”, as a workshop seems like an utter waste to me, for numerous reasons, particularly when the class is offered in Wisconsin. Other classes seem to be almost as much of an exercise in futility. I started work with a major university, before we lost funding, to determine some best practices for teaching voiceover and determined that the current existing model for the most part doesn’t work well. Of course, this is an industry where even highly gifted and talented individuals very often are incapable of getting represented by a talent agent or otherwise fail to obtain work. Again, too many roads with too many stories to draw proper correlation.

This gets back to the “then” and “now” of the industry. Then you went somewhere for your auditions. You received feedback and quite often when reading at the ad agency or client’s office, facial expressions and other signals provided you with lots of guidance, not to mention the actual direction you would receive. You didn’t have to own a home recording studio and for the most part you competed against people in your geographic area. Analog recording meant that if you could read cleanly without mouth noise and put down a good read for a tv spot in 28.7 seconds, you were golden. Today with digital engineering, we can remove the “s” from the end of one word and put it on another. We can take 3 words from take one and marry it up with 6 words from take 5 and do it in a few minutes. In the old days we very often would get selected to do a job from our demos. Today very few people actually get picked from demos, but instead must audition for everything. Auditions for even relatively small jobs are often conducted nationally, with huge competition offering relatively little reward. You as an actor must be responsible for directing yourself, recording yourself, editing yourself, maintaining a home studio and if you’re smart, the insurance and other business trappings to go along with it.  And all of that you must do impeccably for a market that annually has 10% more occupants vying for (in our current recession) less opportunity. Even as you compete, understand that economics are causing producers to do their own v.o. or hire one of the client’s relatives or has one copywriter hire another copywriter to do their v.o.  Oh and you have to be your own marketing director too.

So, you must essentially work like a dog in hopes of beating the odds of being one of the 95% that makes less than $5,000 per year. Unfortunately everyone entering this industry thinks they’ll fight the odds. Nobody ever thinks their first drag on a cigarette can lead to lung cancer or that a little toot of cocaine might lead to homelessness.  Failing at being a voiceover can set someone back considerably, but the good news is that it isn’t carcinogenic and rarely leads to drug addiction.

But if you want to do something cool that you can make lots of money at, try politics or being a litigation lawyer. Since so many of you are lured to voiceover because you hear of the riches one can acquire, then let me recommend a book by Ken Fisher called the Ten Roads to Riches. It outlines ten logical approaches to career paths that can get you wealthy and oddly voice actor isn’t one of them. Might I recommend the audiobook. I directed Ken Fisher reading the foreword and I read the body of the book.

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