Episode 414: Diagnosis

There is a pattern in this industry, and once you see it you cannot unsee it.

Something scary happens. Then the answer arrives packaged as a product.

The pay-to-play sites flooded the market? Get a better demo. Take this class. The pandemic shut down studios? Buy a booth package. Take this home recording course. AI shows up and starts eating our lunch? Learn improv, learn to sing, learn stand-up, book a strategy session, join this program before it is too late.

And look, I am not against any of that. I love education. I sell education. I co-founded a coaching business. So hold that thought because I am going to come back to it and be honest about my own place in all of this. But today I really want to talk about the difference between fixing your craft and fixing your business, because I think a lot of actors right now are buying the answer to the wrong problem.

What the Data Actually Says

This episode started because of a conversation on LinkedIn that a student of mine sent to me. Tom Dier wrote a piece about a new industry survey from Voice Crafters, and Paul Schmidt left a comment pushing back on part of it. I want to give them both their flowers and then tell you where I land.

The survey comes from Moni Renan at Voice Crafters. NAEVA puts out a comprehensive one every year and it is great, but the Voice Crafters survey asks more questions specifically around AI and pulls from a more international respondent pool. Fewer respondents than NAEVA, but a more international picture.

Here is what Tom pulled out of it.

About 74% of voice actors said they definitely or probably lost work to AI. That is the scary one. The one that gets shared everywhere. And it is real. I started noticing shifts in IVR and e-learning, and the change was noticeable in my business. But so was the shift back.

Here is the one I wish people shared just as much. About 72% of voice actors said their rates stayed flat or went up over the last three years. Read those two together. Most of us lost some work. And most of us did not lose our rates.

And then this. Of the actors who definitely lost work to AI, almost 30% raised their rates anyway.

Tom's take, and I agree with him here, is that AI is eating the high-volume, low-budget work. The stuff that online casting sites created over the last 10 to 15 years. A company that used to post a job for a quick cheap read now just types the script into a tool and hits export. The job never gets posted. It doesn't go to a cheaper actor. It goes to nobody. But when a client does decide to hire a human, they still come with a real budget. Because if they wanted cheap, they already have cheap. They chose a person on purpose.

One part of the data that genuinely is a collapse and I do not want to skip past it: actors who work in languages other than English are reporting falling rates at almost double the rate of English-only actors. Roughly 40% compared to about 21%. German, Portuguese, and Spanish markets are getting hit especially hard. If that is you, I see you. That deserves its own conversation. Send me an email at mandy@actingbusinessbootcamp.com. I want to do an episode on that, and I would rather build it from your real experiences than from data I find on the internet.

For most of the people listening, the picture is this. The industry isn't dying. It's stratifying. The bottom is falling out and the top is holding on strong. The question isn't whether there's work. It's how you get to the work that's still there.

Where Tom Gets It Right

Tom says the bottom tier belongs to the algorithms. Yes. That's the sorting and stratifying.

He also says blasting cold emails doesn't work anymore. And the source he uses for that is kind of hilarious. It's Apollo. A company that sells sales outreach tools, contact lists, email automation, sequences, the whole machine. And Apollo itself has said that reply rates have been dropping year after year since 2014.

The company selling the megaphone is telling you that nobody is listening. When the people who profit from a tactic admit the tactic is dying, believe them.

I have been saying some version of this for about eight years. The traditional sales funnel model, buying a list of 500 producers and sending them all the same email and following up seven times, that is a model built for selling software to procurement departments. It was never built for selling a human voice to a creative director who has to trust your instincts. Creative hiring is a trust decision. And trust does not scale the way a funnel wants it to.

Some of my best clients have not come from cold email. They have come from people I worked with who moved to a new company. They have come from social media where I am not talking about my work, I am just talking about voiceover holistically. They have come from me creating connections, networking, and running my business as a people-first business.

Where Paul Schmidt Comes In

Paul left a comment on Tom's post and it is one of the better comments I have read on LinkedIn in a while. Respectful, specific, and it actually moves the conversation forward.

He agrees blasting more emails is not a strategy. But then he pushes on the conclusion. The Apollo data shows a crowded inbox and falling response rates across sales in general. That does not prove that thoughtful, targeted outreach fails for voice actors specifically.

He said this, which I really liked: mass messaging and relevant outreach are different things.

Researching a company, figuring out who actually makes the casting decision, reaching out because you have a real specific reason to and not because they were row 247 on a spreadsheet, that is not spam. That is relationship building.

And his closing point is the one every actor should print out and tape into their booth. Before you decide a channel is dead, look at who you are contacting, why you are relevant to them, and what your results actually show. Most people who say email does not work never actually tracked what they sent to whom or what happened.

Where I Land

The tactic Tom says is dead, the volume play, is dead. The thing Paul says still works, the human play, still works. They are not actually arguing about the same thing. They are using the same word for two different activities.

Things that work are the ones that treat the other person like a person. Networking has always worked because humans hire humans. AI did not change that. If anything, it made it more obvious.

The Part That Nagged at Me

Tom's diagnosis is a business model problem. The low-tier volume is gone. The old outreach does not convert. But when you look at his list of what to do about it, most of it is about the product. Consider more training. Consider non-voiceover training like improv, singing, stand-up.

And I love all of those things. Training will never hurt anyone. Improv will make you a better actor and more fun at parties. But being a better actor does not change how work finds you. Skills are the price of admission. They are not a strategy.

Think about it like a restaurant. If nobody is coming in the door, you can take a knife skills class and your knife skills will get better. But if the problem is that nobody knows the restaurant exists, or they drive right by it, or they think it is a different kind of restaurant, better knife skills are not going to fill the tables. You have to know which problem you have.

His list also includes joining more casting sites to increase your audition volume. I get that logic. More at-bats. But that is kind of the same volume thinking as the cold email blast, just pointed at a different inbox. If AI took the volume, chasing more volume is not the fix. You are just running harder on a treadmill that is getting shorter and shorter.

To be fair, his list also includes focusing your marketing on verticals less affected by AI and thinking about yourself and the industry in new ways. Those are strategic moves. Real strategy. The post ends with an invitation to book a strategy session with him, and that is where the specifics live, and that is fair enough. He is running a business and that is a legitimate way to run it.

The Fear Pattern

Our industry has one, and once you see it you cannot unsee it. Something scary happens and the answer arrives packaged as a product. The fear is public and free. The answer is private and paid.

I have to be honest here because if I am not, this whole episode is hypocritical. I coach. I founded the voiceover program at Acting Business Bootcamp. I sell education. I have been on the other side of this, and I have absolutely posted about industry problems and then mentioned my own program. I am not standing outside the system pointing fingers. I am not accusing anyone of bad motives. I genuinely think Tom believes training is the answer and he is offering what he is good at.

What I am pointing at is the pattern. Because you deserve to recognize it, including when it comes from me.

Here is what really gets me. Going back to the data, 72% of actors held or raised their rates. The industry is stratifying, not dying. When the honest read of the data is that it is stratifying, and the call to action still sounds like an emergency, the gap is worth noticing. The gap is where the fear lives. And fear is a terrible business advisor. Fear tells you to buy the fastest thing, the most expensive thing. It tells you the problem is you, that you are not good enough yet.

And that is almost never the actual problem for a working actor. The question is not am I good enough. It is do the right people know I exist, and do they think of me when it counts. That is not a craft question. That is a strategy question.

Five Questions to Actually Use This Week

I am not going to give you a formula because anyone who tries to give you a formula for a creative business is selling you something, including me if I tried. What I will give you instead are five questions. Grab something to write on.

Who specifically do you want to hire you? Not brands, not e-learning companies. Which ones. Which people inside them. What kinds of projects. If you cannot name 10 actual humans, you do not have a target yet. You have a category.

Where do those people already spend their time, and are you there? Are they at a specific conference, an online community, reading a specific newsletter, listening to a certain podcast? Your job is to be a familiar face in those rooms, not a stranger in their inbox.

When they need a voice, why would your name come up first? Not why are you good. Lots of people are good. Why would you be the first person they think of? What have you done, said, shared, been known for that sticks and gets remembered?

Who has hired you before, and when did you last talk to them like a human and not a vendor? Most of us are sitting on a list of past clients we have not spoken to in years. Those people already trust you. That is the warmest audience you will ever have. A real check-in. Not a just circling back email, those are the worst. Congratulate them on a launch. Ask about a project they did. Something real.

What are you known for? And if your answer is I can do anything, I say this with all the love in my heart, that is the problem. Nobody hires anything. They hire the warm grounded mom voice for healthcare. They hire the dry funny guy for tech explainers. They hire the one who is easy in a directed session and turns around pickups in an hour.

None of those five questions requires a new class. Some of them might lead you to one. Maybe you answer question five and realize you want to move into animation and you need real training for that. Great. Go get it. But the order matters. Strategy first, then skills that serve it, not the other way around.

The Bottom Line

Before you spend your money on anything this month, a class, a session, a program, a new casting site, ask yourself one more question. Is this fixing my craft or my business? Both are real problems. They have different fixes. And a lot of actors right now are paying for the answer to the wrong one.

Tom is right. The bottom tier is leaving us. Paul is right that real human outreach still opens doors. And underneath both of them, they are pointing at the same thing. The industry has always run on people knowing people. AI did not change that. It just stripped everything else away.

Want to Keep the Conversation Going?

If this episode got you thinking, I want to hear from you. Are you working on your craft or your business? And if you work in a non-English market and you are feeling that rate drop, reach out at mandy@actingbusinessbootcamp.com.

Go check out my Substack, the Actors Index. Go check out the Voice Crafters survey. Go check out Tom's post and Paul's comment. Read them. Make up your own mind. That is kind of the whole point.

Thanks for listening, and go be a person today.