Why We’re Closing Our Voice-Over Roster (And What’s Replacing It)

We’ve offered a voice-over and production service alongside our music library for a long time. But here’s the truth about how it actually works behind the scenes, why it’s getting harder to keep up, and what we’re doing about it.

How It’s Worked Until Now

Our roster was never huge, around a hundred voice-over artists. We wanted their demos on the pages so clients could browse when they visited our site. There’s no automated system behind that. It’s all done by hand. Voices also update demos regularly, so multiply that by a hundred artists, and it’s a job in itself.

On top of that, when a client booked a voiceover through us, we managed the whole project. Getting quotes, handling audio production, sourcing music or sound effects, running the process start to finish. We dealt with the clients and paid voice-overs once the job was done. We still do these jobs, and we do them well.

Being on our roster has always been free. Sounds like a good thing, and in many ways it is. But free also means we get a lot more enquiries to join, and each one takes time to deal with. When jobs do come in, we’ve already spent a fair bit of time keeping the roster up to date and dealing with voice-over emails, time we can’t add onto the fee for that particular job.

For this reason, we capped it at around 100 voice-overs.

Not Enough Choice

The real issue is choice. A roster of a hundred, however good, is small compared to what’s out there. In practice, this plays out one of two ways.

Sometimes clients just go elsewhere, somewhere with more choice, and we never hear from them.

Other times, clients come to us wanting us to project manage the job, but nothing on our roster fits the brief. When that happens, we end up going to the big listing sites ourselves, submitting the brief and budget, then downloading and sifting through hundreds of demos (not all at a professional standard), before shortlisting a handful for the client to pick from. It works, but it’s a slow, manual way to do it.

Our focus

We’re a small business, run by two people. Our main passion and focus is music. That’s not changing.

But that doesn’t mean we want to stop helping clients with voiceover requests either. What we want to change is how much of the day-to-day admin and project management falls on us, so we can put more time into music, while still being on hand whenever a client needs a voice-over.

What we’re building

Going forward, we’re building our own directory of voice-over artists. One where we don’t have to spend so much time managing it by hand. It’s called Connect, and it’s still in development; nothing is live yet.

But here’s our vision for it. Connect is a direct-access directory. Clients contact voice-overs directly, however the voice artist prefers. No messaging system, no middle man. We won’t take a commission either. Whatever the voice artist negotiates with a client, they keep in full.

It’s not going to be a huge listing site with hundreds of thousands of profiles. We’re keeping it curated. Every profile gets checked before it goes live, so clients browsing know what they’re listening to is good, whether that’s an established professional or someone earlier in their career.

We’re not trying to build something huge just to chase profit. There are two of us running this. We’d rather build something smaller and genuinely good than something massive and average.

Connect isn’t just for voice-overs either. It’s a wider directory for audio talent: composers, musicians, sound designers, and more. But voice-over artists are where we’re starting.

Pricing

Connect will cost £7.99 per month, or £79 per year.

We’re also opening it up early to a limited number of founding members, the first 500 to join. Founding members get 35% off for as long as they’re listed. That’s not a one-off intro price; it’s 35% off whatever the standard rate is, even if that rate goes up down the line. Once those 500 spaces are filled, the founding-member rate closes and everyone after pays the standard price.