Thinking of "dabbling" in voiceovers?

At least once a week I make the acquaintance of someone who, with a sincere if not serious look on their face, explains to me that they've been thinking about getting into VO, not to have a full-blown career, but to just dabble in it.

I've gotten pretty good now at thoroughly being able to stifle the burst of uncontrollable laughter that threatens to derail what is otherwise a pleasant conversation.

They have no idea that their little dream and those of millions of others are slowly, inexorably destroying the VO business.

Allow me to do some number-crunching for you. As I mentioned in a previous VO article, the talent supply/demand numbers are extremely imbalanced and skewed in such a way as to create aggressive downward pressure on the prices that talent are able to charge producers.

When a newbie enters the fray, especially by way of the so-called pay-to-play talent casting platforms, it weights the imbalance even further.

Then, since the producers are the ones setting the price they are willing to pay a talent on a VO job, and since the majority of talent are increasingly hungry and even desperate for work, the average price on a per-job basis creeps lower and lower with each passing year.

Actually, this isn't necessarily a deal-breaker for me as an established talent. However, newer so-called "modern" talent find it difficult to justify their recent expenditures to build a proper home studio and even procure the necessary gear for a mobile studio in the face of the scant work available to them as a result of the imbalance. So far, this dynamic has not impeded new talents' desire to get into the business.

The bigger problem for established talent and their agents/managers is the fact that the professional union voiceover industry is dying a slow death due to the attrition of older more experienced producers who have been replaced by younger cohorts inexperienced at procuring professional talent, and who are just as apt to book cheaper talent via the pay-to-play platforms than to go the agent route.

Indeed, the whole notion of professionalism in VO is devolving rapidly into something quite unrecognizable as more inexpensive and inexperienced talent find what little bit of work they can get with producers who are happy to hire them at these much lower prices.

A producer will always get what they pay for, but when pricing power is basically non-existent, the inevitable result is that, over time, the mean quality of the VO industry's overall performance will suffer dramatically.

That is an outcome that is unacceptable to many pro talent who are no longer getting adequately compensated for performing, and who will likely fade away quietly from the VO scene into more satisfying and rewarding endeavors.