Business or Pleasure? Fiction Podcasters Are Learning the Hard Truth About “Having It All”
Money money money… does it have to be a dirty word?
Sometimes (let’s be honest here, often) when I can’t sleep, I go on Wikipedia and gleefully fall down the rabbit hole of increasingly niche and fascinating articles. It’s why I’m such a dab hand at trivia nights; mine is a knowledge base composed of useless factoids and weird stories only collected via some truly bizarre late-night reading. On one of those nights, I landed on a page listing every classified phobia, and reader, there were some wild ones. Have you heard of arachibutyrophobia? It’s the fear of peanut butter sticking to the roof of your mouth. Xanthophobia is a fear of the color yellow. Many celebrities these days seem to have ablutophobia, which is a fear of bathing.
Speaking of fear, let’s ask one of the most dangerous rhetorical questions out there: What separates a hobbyist artist from a pro?
Depending on the people you ask, and most importantly, the craft in question, you’ll get a lot of very different answers. A potter may answer that a professional will sell their creations for a profit, and mix original passion products with pieces that cater to audience trends. An ice skater might differentiate people who actively compete or coach, from folks who just enjoy getting out on the rink. A voice actor could count the number of credits to their name, or the reputation of said credits, or how long they’ve been actively booking, etc.
The issue behind that question arises when things like legitimacy, popularity, and other such accolades come into play, but the most volatile of all, and the one that my line of work has a particular issue with, is simple: money.
Now, I’m not here to say that the amount of income you have based on your art is what classifies you as a big shot or not. I consider myself a pretty skilled and accomplished sound designer, but due to the nature of compensation in the field in which I mostly work, I’m certainly not making the big bucks that Hollywood engineers and artists are. Does that mean that the thing I do to put food on the table should be classified as a dalliance? Hell no.
The issue arises, however, when you have a community that is a pretty even mix of hobbyists and professionals, who not only cannot seem to agree on what a person’s time and talents are worth, but even then, has a massive habit of consistent under-compensation.
Ever heard of plutophobia? It’s the fear of money, and in the audio drama community, it is absolutely chronic.
Let’s get this out of the way now: gatekeeping is bad. Duh. I know for a fact that I would not be here today if not for the incredibly open arms of fiction podcasters, who didn’t bat an eye when a podcast made by high schoolers and run by a mid-pubescent closet case from Ohio (shudder) started showing up in their circles. I was welcomed, and mentored, and am eternally grateful. I am not saying, in any way, shape, or form, that we should start writing off new creators who want to get together with their friends and make a fun podcast.
The trouble starts, however, when money talk occurs. Or rather, when it flat-out doesn’t. It often seems like fiction podcasters are allergic to the phrase, “return on investment”. That if you want to make money off of your art, you’re a shill and illegitimate and one step away from selling out.
It’s not an absurd statement. When Wolf 359, a show that had ended years ago and amassed millions of downloads already, announced they were going to be running ads on their feed, several particularly loud voices were up in arms. The idea of a couple ads playing on a completed show that listeners were still getting for free, was just too much. Luckily, many creators in the community rallied around the team, but the question still remains: why does this song and dance of outcry happen nearly every time creators decide to run ads on their free feed?
This isn’t just happening where fans can see it. Show budgets are routinely shoestring, which, while completely understandable for hobbyist productions, still don’t cover nearly enough of the costs to fairly compensate team members. That’s all fine and dandy when you’re making a low-budget show with understood quality to match, but what about when significantly higher quality is expected?
As I’ve improved as a sound designer, I’ve done what you’re supposed to do when that happens and raised my rates. In the interest of transparency, I currently charge $10–20 PFM (per finished minute) for low to moderate-action sequences, and $30 for high-action sequences, like sword fights, spaceship battles, and the like. And that isn’t counting dialogue editing, VA audio cleanup, or anything outside of sound design. Of course, I also have passion rates, which are discounted and flexible rates I will charge if a show can’t afford to pay my usual ones, but I’m extremely passionate about the project. But that is my decision to make. I have turned down jobs in this space that pay everything from sixty cents PFM, to four dollars, because with the amount of time and effort sound design alone takes, I cannot afford to allot space in my schedule for work that does not sustainably compensate me.
I’m not alone. Whisper networks have always been a thing in creative circles, but sound designers and engineers are tight-knit. I’ve yelled at people to raise their rates and re-negotiate with producers, and have been told to do the same. It’s a support system that exists, not with the goal of selling out and draining producers of funds, but of ensuring we are paid enough that we can keep doing this work in the first place. The hard truth about hiring creative people is that when you ask them to accept your offer, you are asking them for a place in their workload that could go to another project. If the return isn’t worth their while, frustration and exhaustion won’t be far behind.
That’s something that doesn’t seem to get taken into consideration across the board. You can experience burnout in creative spaces that you are extremely passionate about. Just because I adore sound design and feel very lucky to get to do what I love every day, doesn’t mean that I can afford to dedicate hours upon hours upon hours of time and effort towards it without seeing a– brace yourself– return on investment. We all know how it feels to put so much of yourself into a relationship and get nothing back. “For the love of the craft” is an extremely noble idea, and if the scale is small and manageable enough, it’s sufficient, but most fiction productions aren’t that scale. They’re multi-episode, multi-season affairs that reach for a level of polish and quality on-par with the big names, like Atypical Artists and Realm. For that level of sustained effort, people need to be fairly compensated, or they’re going to burn out.
Fellow sound designer Brad Colbroock put it best when they told me, “As a hobbyist, doing mostly everything yourself, you can make twenty to thirty long form episodes each season and it’ll probably be fine. You maybe get five to ten voice actors, write scripts with low intensity sound design, and release over the course of a year or two. But when you shift into more professional spheres, keeping that sheer amount of content, while also expanding the cast and often crew; isn’t really sustainable. It can be done, but doing it right is going to require more money you’re likely to pull in from a crowdfunding campaign, and the amount of time you’ll need to devote to each episode will be a lot higher than on previous projects.”.
There is nothing wrong with hobbyist audio drama; it’s where many big names now got their start, and can be an immensely fun and rewarding creative journey. The problem arises when creators start increasing production levels and output, without equally compensating the people in their cast and crew. I’ve seen shows that attempt a high production quality on a volunteer budget stall, go on years-long hiatuses, and flat-out fall apart, because people get burnt out on scads of work with little to no compensation. Read this next sentence out loud: if you are trying to make a high-production value show, and cannot compensate your cast and crew at a rate equal to their output, you cannot be surprised if people get burnt out, fed up, and leave.
This issue isn’t spread out evenly over the different production roles, either. When it comes to the ratio of time and effort to compensation, voice actors routinely get the best deal. Looking at what they do get paid, that’s like being the tallest dwarf. And that’s not saying that voice actors don’t put plenty of time and talent into bringing their roles to life; coming from the position of someone who’s fulfilled pretty much every production role at some point, that’s setting up a stark sense of perspective.
Of course, it’s understandable for folks to be wary about setting standards. The audio drama community has the blessing of being one of the most diverse and accepting indie scenes out there, full to the brim of people excited to share their knowledge and direct newcomers to tips and tricks. Much of that can be chalked up to its low barrier to entry; when technically all you need to get started is a microphone, a DAW, and a story in mind, creators who may have been systemically or financially gate kept from other industries can have both the space, and creative control, to tell their important stories their way.
Note, however, I said technically.
Let’s face it: after the boom of new shows during 2020 and 2021, the indie scene has grown far too vast for anyone to listen to every show that premieres, much less the discerning listener whose only chance for investment is the pilot episode. People are being choosier about which feeds they follow, and that means higher stakes and a greater incentive for creators to put their best foot forward. It’s not pretty to admit, but a show recorded on a gaming headset in a bathroom, edited by an audio novice without the SFX databases, plugins, and plain old experience that a good sound designer has, and posted irregularly at -31 LUFS, can have a fantastic plot brought to life by talented actors, and people will still pass it by due to lack of production quality. That’s not elitism; it’s supply and demand. The more audio fiction shows there are out there, the better those shows will have to be in order to capture audience attention and stand out from the crowd. This is how things work in film, television, comics, book publishing; in short, the entertainment industry. We are a part of it. This is how it goes.
So how do you get your show to stand out? Clean audio recorded by good actors, utilized by a sound designer who knows what they’re doing, to bring to life a well-written story. How do you get all of those components? You need to pay them what they’re worth.
To those who cry gatekeeping, podcasting jack-of-all-trades Tal Minear says, “It’s not gatekeeping to pay people a livable wage. You never hear this sort of argument in any other industry (and rarely hear it outside of indie production at all), because it’s simply not the case that requesting adequate pay for your time and work is gatekeeping. If you can’t pay the people working for you a fair rate, then you shouldn’t be employing them. As it is with your local coffee shop, so it is with you. Would you say that the folks unionizing at Amazon are gatekeeping Bezos? No, because that’s ridiculous.
“Passion projects are great, community theater productions are wonderful, volunteer teams are perfectly valid — but it’s important to remember that what you see as doing something for fun may in fact be seen by someone you bring on as doing something for work. Ultimately, audio drama is part of the entertainment industry and folks wanting pay more in line with that is not stopping your from producing your show; it means you might have to work with your friends instead of hiring someone, or you might have to learn new skills on your own, or you might have to raise additional funds — potentially additional hurdles in making your audio drama, but not gatekeeping in the least.”
It’s not all doom, gloom, and think pieces, though. I’m a strong believer that in every situation, good or bad, there’s something to learn. So: what can we do, both on the side of the producer and team member, to make things better?
The first step is obvious: crew members, raise your rates! Understand where you are at in terms of skill level and experience, and don’t undersell yourself! When you do the latter, you don’t just allow people to take advantage of you, you encourage it. If, say, every sound designer I knew started charging rates that reflected what their product is worth, the standards of what shows are expected to pay us would rise in the blink of an eye.
When it comes to creators, there’s even more work to do. When planning out a new show, season, or project in general, understand that unless you have a lot of guaranteed money on the table, your budget is going to determine your structure and content. Don’t have the money to pay a sound designer for big action setpieces? Take that as an opportunity to choose the few most important to you, and make them really special. Can’t afford to compensate everyone for a twenty episode season? Looks like you’re going to have to kill some darlings and pare it down to a tight ten. If you are planning to crowdfund, you need to set a goal that will allow you to pay people fairly. We need to get better at normalizing asking for more, so we can give more. According to Brad, “I want fewer people to ask ‘How much of this show are we willing to make?’ and instead look at their budget and schedule before asking ‘How much of this show should we make?’”.
The best example for the above is the RTD-era of Doctor Who, vs. Sherlock. The former had a very limited budget, and produced some of the best and most creative episodes of the franchise to date (look up the story of fan and critic-favorite, Blink). The latter was given a massively overblown budget to run with as they pleased, and is so infamously bad, someone made an almost two hour long video essay about why. When I couldn’t afford to license music for season two of my show, Where the Stars Fell, I created a soundtrack that’s a mix of perfectly atmospheric country gospel, and original songs that fans adore. Limitations can force you to think outside the box and spark your best ideas.
There’s also the opportunity to learn from other creative spheres, both big and small. The gaming industry has long had an unfortunate history of underpaid, crunched-out workers on opaque contracts. Renee Taylor Klint, a new-on-the-scene fiction podcaster who works in production for what she calls, “Big company gamedev”, had this to report: “A lot of us sign contracts with big publishers to help get our games made, and so more people are sharing their experiences and advice when it comes to signing those contracts, because some are more beneficial to the indie dev than others. Some folks even share blacked-out versions of their contracts so that more people can learn about reasonable (and unreasonable) terms”.
One of the most important tools you can cultivate as a creator is financial literacy, which puts the knowledge, and thus power, firmly in your court. We’ve already seen a push in corporate spaces to normalize sharing salaries and bonus values; that money talk needs to happen here, too.
Leslie Gideon is a fiction podcaster by night, and a certified business “girlboss” by day. Here’s what she had to say on the matter: “Audio drama podcasters should make the effort to cultivate financial literacy and build towards a return on investment for two reasons: for their own benefit, and for the benefit of the audio drama community at large.
“On the individual level, it’s always important to track finances the moment money starts exchanging hands. Having all the numbers laid out also lets a showrunner see, quantifiably, the value of their time and effort. It’s especially important to track that cash flow if there’s any interest in having a production generate profit, or even just pay for itself and break even, as it allows a podcaster to understand where their money is going and where it’s coming from, which makes it easier to build a plan and make adjustments as needed.
“On the community level, having that financial knowledge empowers any podcaster to objectively understand their worth. This is good for our peers, and discussing our finances with each other allows us to build standards across audio drama podcasting, which is still in its infancy. This knowledge is also vital for us to have as ambassadors of this new medium, as other, older sectors of the entertainment industry begin to examine our spaces and see if we’re worth the effort of publicity, outside investment, and respect alongside other new media. It’s not enough to say our stories are valuable as art. For the entertainment industry to take us seriously, we need to be able to point to the numbers as evidence, to point to our profits and say ‘this is how much value we can generate’. Once we start speaking their language, we’ll be seen as the serious content creators we aim to be, and we’ll be able to elevate our medium as a whole to new heights.”
The takeaway here is not that we need to start going at each other’s throats about who deserves to be calling themselves what. Not only is that counterintuitive, but at the end of the day, money really is only one of the metrics we utilize to gauge professionalism in what is still a new and rapidly growing field. What we should be doing, not just for each other, but for ourselves, is holding folks accountable (are you a member of the WGA Audio Alliance? You should be. They’d be glad to have you!). We need to start being more transparent with show and crowdfunding budgets, itemizing and teaching each other what goes into each role. We need to do our research when budgeting, asking those post-production roles what their rates are, and building that section at least around that. We need to understand that for a creative community to thrive and grow, people have to be able to keep doing what they’re doing, and in the world we live in, that means getting paid a fair and sustainable wage.
We need to realize that we are a group of immensely talented, skillful, brilliant people, and we deserve to be paid what we’re worth. That number begins at much higher than many of us believe. It’s not a reach, though. It’s a start.
