A Review of Job Sites for Voice Talent
There are two main sites for voice talent where you can bid for jobs. They are www.voice123.com and www.InteractiveVoices.com. These sites market heavily. If you go to any popular search engine and type in something like “voice over talent,” these sites are sure to be near the top of the list.
Here’s how they workâÂ?¦
Voice123.com
At www.voice123.com you can sign up for a free account first to get a feel for it. You’ll get a little Web site to describe yourself and your particular talents. It will have a URL in the form: yourname.voice123.com. My Voice123 site is:
colincampbell.voice123.com for instance. What will happen is that you’ll get a bunch of emails offering jobs as “public leads.” The problem is that you can’t answer public leads as a free member. The talent seeker would somehow have to know your little site and send you a private lead. This is not very likely. They won’t find you. So, tantalized by the chance to answer these public leads and try out for a voice job, you sign up at $195 per year. Most of these talent seekers would rather just dangle a karat out there and see who answers rather than go poking around to find a voice. At Voice123 they post about 5-10 jobs a day, except for weekends when it all slows down. These job postings will often have a script that you are supposed to record as a demo. Often you will want to replace the organization’s name in the script to something generic so they won’t steal your work. Also, you have the option to only allow them a low quality stream rather than a good quality download. Most folks wouldn’t except the quality of streaming but then again, it doesn’t put your voice in the best light. You will want to consider this for each one depending on the usability of the script. The site suggests you use an audio “watermark” such as a recurring tone to make the recording unusable. I’ve chosen to just give them a partial script or change the wording to make it difficult for them to use the demo in any real way.
It becomes a little disheartening when you realize that 200 other talents are answering the same lead. Think about it. How is this talent seeker supposed to listen to 200 demos? Most likely he or she will listen to a dozen or so and pick someone. The cards are really stacked on the side of talent seekers. So you slave away answering every possible lead and hope for the best. Eventually, if you try hard enough you will land your first job. My first job was reading one sentence for a radio commercial. I made $50. It was an easy job but took a lot of work to get. Since then I’ve done a little better but I’m not getting rich. When the talent seeker selects you, you then deal with them directly usually by email. Hopefully you’ll have a PayPal account to make it easy for the client to pay you. This also gets a bit tricky because you have to either ask for some money up front or trust them to pay the bill after you’ve delivered the goods. My hope is that after you’ve gotten a few paying gigs, the talent seeker will put you in their favorites and possibly use you in a future project. I haven’t had any repeat business yet so I don’t if my theory will hold up in practice.
InteractiveVoices.com
At www.InteractiveVoices.com, things are bit quieter. The membership price structure is similar with a free membership and two pay tiers. There is the $99 tier and the $199 tier. I chose to go the route of the “preferred” tier at $99 since the premium level didn’t offer much more except for some extra marketing and a little more space to post demos. Again, as with Voice123, you get your own little Web site.
At InteractiveVoices, there aren’t as many listings and they seem to be a bit more diverse. Here are a few key differences between InteractiveVoices and Voice123. At InteractiveVoices, you have no idea how many people answered the lead. Also, there is no option to keep the custom demo in a low quality streaming format. You have to be careful to make the custom demo somehow unusable to the talent seeker because the demo audio quality is pretty good. While Voice123 does a good job of filtering out jobs that don’t fit your profile (sex, language, dialect,) InteractiveVoices seems to let a lot of jobs through the filter that you can’t bid on because you don’t speak the foreign language required or you are male and they want female. On the plus side though, InteractiveVoices has been offering some neat features lately like free downloads of royalty free music and sound effects if you want to use them in your demos or jobs, advice pages for talents and other little extras. InteractiveVoices feels a bit more “slick” compared to the “meat market” feel of Voice123.
In conclusion, both sites are good at bringing you possible jobs. The competition is tough at Voice123. At InteractiveVoices, you can’t really tell how much competition there is but I would assume it’s similar. I’ve noticed on occasion a particular voice job posted on both sites. I’ve thought to myselfâÂ?¦ “how many demos can one person listen to?”
Both sites are an outlet for people who could not otherwise get an audition in the traditional sense. Most of the jobs are legit and some for large agencies. If you work hard and take the time to answer every lead with a quality demo, and you are half-way decent, you’ll eventually get a job but you will have to be patient and learn what the talent seekers expect.
