The Way Forward: 7 Keys to Finding Your Path in a Changing Voice Acting Landscape

The voiceover industry is undergoing changes unlike anything we’ve seen since the first days of online casting reordered the way many parts of our business worked. As is typical during times of change, this has led to much hand-wringing, but just like the shockwaves of twenty years ago created a generation of talent who navigated change to tremendous success, so now exists the opportunity for anyone prepared to thoughtfully adapt to thrive and grow their business.

KEY #1: INCREMENTALISM

Something that must be remembered is that careers in voiceover, as in many other walks of life, are built incrementally. We live in a society that cannot abide a lack of instant results. Football teams pay tens of millions of dollars to top draft picks only to declare them a bust if they haven’t become elite in two years, whereas in past eras greats like Steve Young and Peyton Manning, Drew Brees and even current star Patrick Mahomes were given several seasons to develop mastery of their craft. Success is not fast food but for a lucky few. There’s a reason the tortoise beat the hare. Most enduring voiceover careers are built on the incremental development of a base of long-term clients in less-glamorous genres, while big one-off jobs can make a month or a year extra special. Think about it this way: You need to beat out hundreds of elite talent to book that big national campaign or animation job. But a corporate narration, e-learning, medical, or small-time commercial client who pays you $500/job three times a month is an $18,000/year client. Ten loyal clients like that and you’re in the top 1-5% of earners in voice acting. And these kinds of jobs represent the most abundant and easily-sourced work in the industry. Small starts can lead to big finishes. Building relationships and nurturing client loyalty will carry you through even the most jarring changes to the way we work. It may not be glamorous, but if you got into VO for the fame you got into the wrong line of work.

 

KEY #2: DON’T BE AFRAID TO SHOOT YOUR SHOT

Sticking with football analogies…..summon your inner Travis Kelce and just go for it with that dream agent or manager, (just be sure you have Kelce-like skills!) I recently had a top-5 agent tell me that they are constantly getting people telling them they “aren’t ready to send [their] demo.” To which the reply was, “What the f*** are you waiting for?!” It doesn’t matter how new you are or what you sound like….with top tier representation, timing is everything. If you’ve done the work, have the skills, have the reel or reels that showcase them, and the ability to back those reads up, let ’em fly. Yes, your coaches or producer/s should give you some guidance, but don’t get caught up in hesitation. All the agents have plenty of voice actors. But they don’t have a you yet…..and they might just hear you and decide they need one. Agents are just people. And business-people at that. If they hear something they think can earn for their agency, you’re likely to get a yes.

 

KEY #3: MAKE PEACE WITH AI

Can we all agree yet that the robopocalypse is starting to feel a bit like Y2K? For those of you just joining us in the last quarter century, I’ll mansplain that Y2K was a moment before the year 2000 when eminent scientists and commentators were largely convinced that there could be a massive technology-based catastrophe due to most computers at the time only being coded to recognize years up to 1999. Planes would fall from the sky, nuclear missiles would escape their silos, factories would shut down, we’d all become cannibals and look like characters from Mad Max. Now, to be fair, I’ve grown very pale and quite bald, so that last part might have come true, but the rest….not so much.

AI is here to stay. It will get better. It has and will be used for voice work. Some talent will lend their voices to it in ways both wise, unwise, and in between. But there is ZERO EVIDENCE on the demand side to back up any assertion that AI is substantially impacting professional voice actors, and for that matter, even semi-professional voice actors. Agents are sending as many auditions as ever. Talent doing marketing are building careers. Even P2P sites have not seen any noticeable decline, (P2P CEOs have publicly stated that their numbers hover anywhere from five percent erosion to actual growth, though in some cases slowing growth, which is easily attributable to any number of causes that might include AI, but is in no way significant enough to justify the terror this technology strikes into so many.)

If anything, organizations like SAG-AFTRA and NAVA have been shockingly effective in helping to move the needle on serious legislation and agreements that will substantially protect working voice actors. Their efforts, those of the legislators who are coming together on both sides to take this issue seriously, and the skepticism of the business world as AI continues to underperform earnings expectations, and that of the public in general about its value, means AT MOST this is a P2P-site level disruption of the industry, and possibly less than that. Twenty years after the dawn of the P2P sites, we’re still here, and we’ll still be here twenty years from now. It’s time to make peace that AI exists, we wish it didn’t, (at least in this capacity,) but that it also is not the grim reaper of VO.

 

KEY #4: UNDERSTAND THAT RECESSIONS IN THE ENTERTAINMENT INDUSTRY ARE CYCLICAL

Now, as much as I’ll be the voice of reason on AI, there’s no denying that the entertainment industry at large is facing a crisis. Driven largely by the ravenous appetite for profits that are endemic to undertaxed mega-corporations, as well as the dramatic change in how consumers consume content, traditional forms of entertainment are seeing production budgets slashed and jobs cut to the bone. There may not be an actual recession in the greater economy, but there certainly is a major one in the arts. This inevitably impacts the most creative and artistic among us, with voiceover jobs tied to movies, traditional linear TV and even streaming, and video games under enormous pressure. The arts are, in the end, a business. One largely driven by ad dollars. Right now, the rapid shift in where eyeballs are looking for entertainment is causing an entire industry to play whack-a-mole trying to figure out where they will land….or if they will just keep moving from one new app or platform or new technology to the next. It’s hard to keep up. But while artistic forms are impermanent, the arts are forever. Ultimately, whatever Gen-Z and Gen-Alpha and their kids decide is the desired form and delivery mechanism of entertainment will take shape. And actors, and voice artists, and those who can deliver the role convincingly and sell a product without turning off an audience and teach a generation how to do the things that will be their essential skills will have a place in that ecosystem and those who excel will continue to be paid fairly and even handsomely for their work. Change isn’t the only constant. Humanity requires creative outlets and art, and eventually the money will once again flow freely to those who can master how to tell the story in the chosen forums of the future.

 

KEY #5: MAKE YOURSELF IMPOSSIBLE TO IGNORE

Good enough should never be good enough, but at times in our industry, it has been. At the dawn of the online casting era, an above average talent who learned how to game site algorithms could earn six figures with a volume strategy. Those days are gone. Now, to be sure, there are still plenty of earners both online and through traditional means of sourcing VO work, as well as the beginning of an era of ultra-savvy direct marketers and SEO stars who are finding niches and sub-niches to dominate. But good enough doesn’t cut it anymore. You could fill a stadium with online trolls who love to hate on voiceover coaches, schools, and demo producers, but the fact of the matter is that the proliferation of these services, (and yes, we all know there are plenty of dubious ones and buyer beware,) has forced EVERYONE to up their game. B-plus doesn’t work in 2024 and beyond, and while that may chafe if you were one of the ones coasting on just being good enough, there are two choices: Be great, or be gone.

It’s not just historically underrepresented communities that are thriving in voice acting today: There are plenty of voices in more saturated demographics still killing it. But they bring their A-game to Every. Single. Audition. And to Every. Single. Session. And their A-games are staggeringly good. Want to make it in today’s marketplace? Can you look at a piece of copy and instantly conceive of and be prepared to execute nine different delivery approaches for that read? Are you ready for a director in a live callback to say, “okay, I’m gonna pretend to be someone in the store and we’d like you to go off-script and just riff some funny comebacks?” And then be, actually, funny? No? Get there. Because your competition is.

Be so good they can’t say no. And they’ll still say no 90% of the time. But if they’re saying yes 10% of the time you’re gonna have a very nice career indeed.

 

KEY #6: EMBRACE AI? WHAT? OKAY, STREAMLINE PROCESSES

I had a chat with a casting director recently that I found fascinating. This is someone who, as a highly sophisticated creative who works in our space, you’d expect to be as far from the AI bandwagon as possible. And with regard to voiceover, they are. However, they use it in PRACTICALLY EVERY OTHER ASPECT OF THEIR BUSINESS. This person told me that using AI to streamline administrative processes, prioritize tasks and emails, organize their schedule, etc…. was saving them essentially an entire workweek per month. Now, whether you use AI, a great personal assistant from somewhere like vaforvo.com, other technology, or some combination thereof, one thing voice actors must always consider is this: At the pinnacle of the industry, (setting aside mega-millionaire animation talent who are largely celebs these days anyway,) the upper crust of just “working VO’s” earn in the low seven figures. That means that your time is, in theory, worth perhaps as much as $1,000 per hour or more at its maximum potential, based on a traditional 40 hour workweek. Now, almost everyone reading this is going, “geez, JMC, $100/hour over a 40 hour workweek would be just fine,” but even at that number, ask yourself, why are you doing tasks manually that could be streamlined with technology, and once you’ve started earning sufficiently, human help that might cost $20-$50/hour? YOUR TIME IS WORTH MORE! If you find tech or cutting-edge, yes, even AI, tools intimidating….do what you did when you started in VO….take a course…LEARN….and free up your time to get your voice on the ears that will pay you WHAT YOU ARE WORTH.

 

KEY #7: HAVE THE VISION TO SEE A BRIGHT FUTURE FOR YOURSELF, AND THE INDUSTRY

Let’s talk politics. Okay. Let’s not. Ever. Seriously I might consider letting the robots take over if we could just….not. But there’s an analogy to be made between politics and our industry in the sense that the voiceover world is not what you see on social media. Just like politics is not what you see on social media. I want you to think about that. Imagine the last time that you were at a non-political in-person gathering, like a voiceover conference for instance. Or a concert. Or a ballgame. Did you discuss politics with the other people there. Did you complain about inflation, or the dangers of authoritarianism, or whether or not there was sufficient fact-checking of that thing you just read or watched or heard? Probably not. You know why? Because all the complaining, vitriol, passion, and most of the ugliness lives behind a keyboard. When people come together, in person, we have a way of just wanting to lift each other up and believe the best about each other and the best about what the future has to offer.

Similarly, voiceover social media can sometimes be a nest of acrimony. Its where grievances are aired, fingers are pointed, and yes, sometimes home to important and needed discussions, but for the most part it is NOT the actual industry. The actual industry is the work being booked, the sessions being recorded, the finished product making it to air, and, when we’re together, the actual industry is people. People who time and again show that they are brilliant minds, free spirits, kind hearts, and hard-working actors dedicated to this craft and to its future. I’m never more inspired than when I’m with my colleagues, whether they are fellow voice actors, casting pros, directors, producers, or whatever role they play in this magically creative business. And one thing I am certain of is that such a collection of giving, decent, and magically talented professionals can write whatever future they….whatever future WE want. All we need is to give ourselves permission to believe it can be so.

Change is not the only constant. The arts are forever. And so are the artists.