I’ve been an actor since I was 6, a voice actor for going on 23 years, and have been full time for the last several. My meandering career of theater, radio, voiceover, website and content development, and media and technology sales coalesced into a thriving, successful, and gratifying voiceover business. Knock on wood, I’ve been able to do well for myself, and for that I am immensely grateful.

But I’ve had the sense for the last two to three years, well before the pandemic, that there are a lot of folks struggling in this business. I feel like we do a really good job as an industry of getting people trained up on acting, technique, and performance, and we get them enough training to be able to competently record, edit, and deliver a quality audio voice track in a room that’s treated and sounds professional. And then we send these freshly trained voice actors out into the world and wish them luck.

And they go, “Uh… ok…. What do I do now?”

And so they sign up for a pay-to-play. Or two. And they audition. And audition. And audition some more. And maybe a couple of hundred auditions in, when they haven’t booked, they start to lose confidence.

And that starts to creep into their auditions. And they still don’t book.

Then they start to lose hope.

Then they audition less because this is hard.

Then they start to lose the fire. The dream.

So they think, ‘What if I get an agent? How do I get an agent?” But agents won’t work with actors who haven’t proven they can get work consistently. So that often doesn’t work.

And pretty soon weeks have gone by and they haven’t auditioned.

The fire that once burned bright is now just a dimly glowing ember. And sometimes without even realizing it, they’ve given up.

And that’s heartbreaking.

This sense that people are getting stuck came to a head for me after reading this year’s State of VO Survey, conducted and published by the Voice Actors of NYC. A couple of years ago, Caryn Gilfry, one of the members of that group posted in one of the VO Facebooks groups that - and I’m paraphrasing here - we’ve got all these opinions flying around on the internet about the industry, but what we don’t have is a lot of data. So they started the survey to collect the data.

This year, they had about 1,250 respondents. If you search US voice actors on LinkedIn, you’ll get about 16,000 results. So potentially, that’s ~8% of us. The sample size is significant.

Two things stuck out to me:

1. In 2020, half of the respondents (48.3%) made less than $8,000 a year from voiceover.

2. Three quarters (73.5%) of all voice actors reach out to market themselves two or less times a day.

And so I set out to do the same thing that the Voice Actors of NYC did - collect actual data. But not through a survey. I wanted to have real conversations with voice actors because I wanted to find out several things…

1. Is this problem I see, people getting stuck, indeed a real thing, and not just in my head?

2. Are people having common sticking points? Do they have similar fears and frustrations?

3. If this problem is real, is it definable?

4. If the problem is real and definable, is there a definable, actionable solution?

My original goal was to talk to at least 50 people. But as I began to have these chats, I realized some of the folks I was talking to were too new to the business to even have a chance to be stuck yet. So now I’ll be talking to at least 60 folks. And in truth, it might take a tad longer than 60 days start-to-finish.

I’m about halfway through these conversations and I haven’t analyzed the data yet. But I can tell you that the greatest consequence of these chats is that I’m meeting so many amazing people and making new friends along the way.

I’m also struck by the willingness of people to share their struggles, fears, frustrations. I feel like we’re all so siloed in our work-from-home, tiny, padded worlds that it’s been cathartic for people to have an opportunity to vent these feelings to another voice actor. To me, it’s courage and vulnerability at its finest.

We’ve got so many brave, honest people in this business and I’m just blown away by the generosity these voice actors have shown. You don’t necessarily get that through a survey form.

To everyone I’ve had the pleasure of chatting with, and to everyone who tried to volunteer, I can’t thank you enough.