Gaslight, Gatekeep, Girlboss, Pay Me
Imagine a podcast.
Imagine all the different components it requires. Imagine compiling them, organizing your budget, getting your schedule in order, encouraging your team to work hard, play hard, and stay focused. Imagine getting everything set up for release day when the snag to end all snags occurs: for some apocalyptic reason, you are required to remove one of those components. Which is the worst option? Which element, if chosen, will completely prevent you from being able to release this show?
If you said sound designer, congratulations: you’re right, and you’re probably also one of us.
The thing about the medium of audio drama is that our very job description is right there in the name: audio. Without someone to collect your actors’ takes, turn your writer’s action lines into sequences of sound effects, and work with your director to craft a project that aligns to their vision, you do not have a show. Maybe you’d have a collection of lines, room tone, and outtakes an actor has sent you, a script file, or some director’s notes, but no show. Nothing to upload to your hosting site, promote on your socials, and share with your friends. That glue is gone.
As someone who regularly works in multiple aspects of podcast production, from voice acting to writing and directing, I’m very familiar with volunteer work. I have something called the “Bestie Discount”, where if a close professional friend asks for a work favor, and it’s a job that I don’t find to be personally labor intensive, I’m happy to do it for free. This is pretty much limited to small voice acting roles, production consulting, and directing. I’ve also auditioned for plenty of VA roles that are stated to be volunteer, simply because I am invested in the character and project and don’t mind doing that work for free. It’s a case-by-case personal choice that, in indie audio drama, is extremely common.
However, there is one job that, regardless of the situation, I cannot justify doing volunteer: sound design.
I am a combination of mostly self-taught, with a chunk of university education thrown in for good measure, but that experience has taken years to acquire and shape into marketable skills. Out of all the jobs I do creatively, I find sound design to be both my favorite, and the most difficult. And that’s okay; I like a challenge! But in order to maintain a proper work-life balance and protect myself from burnout, I need to set boundaries when it comes to using my time and talents, and how I am compensated for them. I do not do unpaid sound design. Period.
This philosophy isn’t limiting my professional opportunities, either. A professor I’ve had several courses with has done sound design for formative TV shows such as The Sopranos, DuckTales, and Legend (he’s even brought the Emmy he won for his work on The X Files to class, which never stops being supremely cool). When I informed him that I was excited to branch out into sound designing for film and television, but curious about my job prospects, he outright laughed. Sound designers are the plumbers of the entertainment industry: what we do is time and labor intensive, takes a large amount of time and investment to learn and get good at, and isn’t as conventionally glamorous (at least outside of the audio-only medium of AD) as directing or acting. At least in TV and film, you don’t have nearly as many people jonesing for sound design positions as actors, directors, writers, etc, which means we can afford to be choosier and ask for higher rates.
There is a reason that audio drama casting calls for voice actors receive hundreds more submissions than ones for sound designers: the rule of supply and demand. Both positions are needed for a great show, and you simply have a larger pool of applicants to narrow down for one than the other. Of course, capitalism is garbage, and I am very much applying this rule in a vacuum, but the fact still remains.
Putting aside the time it takes to learn and master skills, the sound designer for your show will spend hours dialogue editing, designing, mixing, and mastering a scene that takes your actors perhaps an hour to record. When you pay your sound designer, you are not just paying for their time and skills, but also their resources; a high-quality, consistently updated library of sound effects, plugins, and programs isn’t acquired for free! While anyone can theoretically hop into Audacity and place clips in a sequence, a professional is going to offer you a verifiable product that you should compensate them for.
The skinny here is that with more and more shows premiering every day, you need yours to put its best foot forward, and the thing that will make or break that is how it sounds. People are consolidating their queues, narrowing down their to-listen lists to the shows that really promise to be worth their valuable time and ears. Gone are the days when a bit of jank could be forgiven because the pool of options was so small; if your actors are speaking into headphone microphones, and extended narration is clearly being utilized to compensate for an inability to design an engaging sequence, you have a very slim chance of finding an audience. A good sound designer is not just worth a place in your budget, they should be one of the first things you budget for.
Hot and spicy take: the person doing the largest and longest amount of quantifiable work on your show should be the highest paid person, and if that isn’t you, it should be your sound designer. And that’s not just me trying to collect a paycheck; I’ve advised this to friends who have no intention of bringing me on for that role. It’s simply the right thing to do.
Indie audio drama is a group of very passionate, very creative individuals passing around the same five dollars so we can all make amazing art, but as podcasting is starting to go mainstream, we need to start laying down the law to protect our talents. People will begin to take audio fiction seriously when we show that we are taking ourselves seriously, and that includes acknowledging the movers and shakers we could not do without. Volunteer crews, events like 24 Hour Hubris, and the unavoidable fact that no one can afford to pay everyone what they are truly worth, will always exist here. That’s what makes indie scenes so wonderful: passion trumps profit. When the opportunity exists, however, it is essential to give everyone as much due as possible. Imagine a world where David Acord makes just as much, and is just as famous, as Chris Evans. Doesn’t that sound amazing?
