It was time to find out what all of the fuss was about. As a professional voice-over artist, I balked at joining Voices.com. Why should I, I asked, pay a subscription fee to join? Now I get it.
Voices.com started in a London basement and has grown into a multi-million dollar company that regularly makes the “best of” and “fastest growing” lists of Canadian, and sometimes North American, companies. Anyone can put up a free listing that really doesn’t get you much of anything. You can’t audition for posted jobs. You can only be searched if someone is really, really trying to find you. It’s what most people do. Almost 100,000 of them in fact. But only a few thousand pay the fee and that’s how you get to try out for the good jobs.
I recently updated my freebie profile and I guess that alerted the staff so they started bugging me, nicely, about buying a membership. I put them off long enough that it got down to $10 for the first month. How could I refuse? I couldn’t. The pool of available jobs is amazing. They come from all over the world and range from web projects to radio commercials to video voice-overs to live announcements for events such as conferences and business dinners. Voices.com has a special software that matches skills with jobs so you only get alerted to the ones you’re likely right for – keeping in mind that there could be dozens, even hundreds of others who are just as right as you! You can also see how many people have auditioned. It makes you really bring your A game.
This service is not for the faint of heart or the lazy. They told me the average is one job for every 20 auditions. I got a job the second day but it took another week before I got my second and the same time span again until my third. They’re premium jobs that I wouldn’t even have access to without this website and the business people who regularly use professional voices are hearing me, even if they’re not yet hiring me…yet. I’ve done somewhere around 150 auditions. Our friend Eddie who is a US-based voice actor (and film actor) describes his job as a Professional Auditioner. So I’m patient. And now I get it. And I hope Fjurgen in Norway gets it too when it comes to my audition for him!