Is Voice Over Work DRYING UP?!? THE 6 BIG CAUSES

As I touched on in my last video, 2023 has been a slow year for voiceover. In fact, this might be the first year in the 21st century that we can honestly say that voiceover work has not… available work… has not grown year over year.

There's no hard data that I know of in the voiceover industry that shows the exact amount of available work. But I talked to a lot of people in this business and pretty much everybody agrees it's been a down year.

This has also been the year that A.I. has exploded onto the scene.

This time last year, absolutely no one had heard of ChatGPT. That's because it didn't exist until November 30th of 2022, and by February 2023, ChatGPT was a household name.

Terms like generative AI were barely on our radar a year ago and they're now part of our everyday lexicon. A year ago, A.I. Voices was a term and a concept we all knew and were aware of and knew was coming. But nobody had any idea what that was going to mean for 2023.

Now, that said, if we agree that voiceover is in a bear market then that begs the question: why?

There are six main reasons VO is slow right now and I'm going to break them down for you today.

Number one: the easy but incomplete answer is AI

That's because it's the shiny new villain and our little world of voiceover. There's been a Chicken-Little-esque reaction to AI in voiceover. And I think, quite frankly, most of it is overblown

Is A.I. having an effect on voiceover? Absolutely. Especially in the low end market in the Fiverr market and in the Upwork market and that effect will continue to evolve and be impactful over time.

The fact is that well-trained voice actors who know how to market their services are continuing to work and will continue to work for a very long time

In the short term, AI is not the biggest threat to voice over. Alow economic growth, supply chain shortages, inflation and a possible recession as we move into 2024 are all way bigger threats than AI.

Number two: a slow economy

Consumer confidence absolutely cratered in June of 2022, even lower, by the way, than it did in April of 2020. That's how bad it cratered out. And while it's on the upswing now, we're still dealing with the medium and long-range impacts of that.

Consumer confidence suffers, then people begin to spend less money. Then advertisers and content creators begin to pull back. Production suffers, and before you know it, that VO spigot begins to run slow.

As we get into the fourth quarter of 2023, consumer confidence is on the rebound, but it was slow to get into this cycle. It's going to be slow to get out. It may be a year or more until Joe Average Everyday Voice aActor begins to see an increase in revenue over what we're seeing right now.

But there is more potential good news. JP Morgan Chase says:

“Given stronger than expected economic momentum so far in 2023, a recession appears off the table this year.”

They expect GDP to expand at a 2% pace for the fourth quarter of 2023.

And the Conference Board says this:

“Looking into late 2024, we expect the volatility that dominated the US economy over the pandemic period to diminish in the second half of 2024, we forecast that overall growth will return to more stable pre-pandemic rates. Inflation will drift closer to 2% and the Fed will lower rates to near 4%.”

Number three: the ripple effects of the pandemic

Let's not forget that we just went through the most disruptive event globally of the last 75 years: the COVID-19 pandemic.

The entire world shut down overnight in a way that no one living could ever remember. Almost 7 million people have died from COVID 19. And it literally turned the world upside down.

If you didn't lose someone to COVID, you know, someone who did. I lost my brother and his wife within 45 hours of each other to the Delta variant. And I understand just how horrible and awful that the whole pandemic was. I understand that psychologically we want to put all of that in the rearview mirror as fast as possible, but it will take the better part of a decade for the logistical, financial, social, and psychological effects of the COVID- 19 pandemic to fully ripple out.

And voiceover is no exception to that.

Number four: the strikes

Now, as I'm filming this, the Writers Guild of America is getting ready to vote to end a five months long strike against the AMPTP and the SAG=AFTRA strike in streaming and TV and theatrical, also against the AMPTP, has been going on since July of 2023.

As the New York Times said recently:

“The dual strikes by the writers and the actors, the first time that has happened since 1960 have effectively shut down TV and film production. For months, the fallout has been significant, both inside and outside the industry. California's economy alone has lost more than $5 billion, according to Governor Gavin Newsom.”

So, yes, the strikes are having a real-world effect on the economy, on business, in the voiceover world. And what happens in the union world affects all of us.

Still on the horizon, SAG-AFTRA has voted to authorize a video game strike against video game developers. Now that hasn't happened yet and negotiations for now are still ongoing.

So, three major strikes by two major creative unions, which if not entirely concurrent, will certainly have a lot of heavy overlap.

Now, one of the central issues, as you well may be aware by this point, is, in all of these strikes by the way, the use of artificial intelligence and the protections for creatives like writers and performers that need to be put in place.

Because, as I talked about earlier, the awareness of the impact of AI is so incredibly high right now, these unions, SAG-AFTRA, the Writers Guild, possibly others, have a leverage right now that they will never have again if they don't get the proper protections for their members put in place right now on this contract cycle.

So yeah, there's a lot of disruption in the union world right now, in the Hollywood world right now, and a general disturbance in the VO force.

But the resolution of the Writers Guild strike is the first real sign of progress regarding protections for creative workers like writers and actors against AI. And my hope is that these protections that are being built into these contracts now will serve as a precedent for legislation which will help protect nonunion folks and maybe even the public at large.

Number five: a still saturated market

In our world of voiceover, the pandemic killed the in-person audition. It took down conferences and it flooded the voiceover market with completely new, completely untrained people, whose Auntie Edna always told them they had a nice voice and they needed to find a way to work from home.

Now, that flood has peaked and the vast majority of the people that got into voiceover thinking it was a fast track to quick money with a USB microphone and no training, the vast majority got their asses handed to them and either are now back out of the business or are now complaining “what a racket” voiceover is.

Many though, stuck around. And if you took the time to research the business, get solid training, learned to act, learned to record and edit, treat this craft and business like a craft and a business, and learned to market your services, then I absolutely applaud you and you are well on your way to a long and fruitful career in this business.

So, while the business isn't drowning in Blue Yeti Bettys like it was in 2020, there is still a big bubble and more voice actors than there ever have been in history.

There is no denying there are more voice actors competing for less work than at any other time in recent memory and that supply and demand dynamic, industry-wide, makes this slowdown feel more pronounced than anyone can really remember.

And finally, number six: a still untrained market

I said earlier that voice actors who are well trained and who understand and know how to market their services are continuing to work. And that's true. And they will continue to work for a long time. And that's true, but it's not true for undertrained voice actors.

As AI gets better, it is going to obliterate the entire bottom end of this business. The stuff we're training doesn't matter as much. And untrained voice actors are not only untrained in the nuts and bolts of performance and recording and editing, but they're also untrained and how to market their services.

So why are we so undertrained as a group?

• Reason number one is, as we just said there are more voice actors than there ever have been.

• Number two, the snake oil salesman in this business, and thank God there are relatively few of them, who peddle this “no experience necessary, get rich quick” bullshit narrative.

There is no substitute in this business for being a great voiceover actor.

Doubling down in times of crisis is a force multiplier. What do I mean by that? I mean that the crisis will pick off a vast amount of the competition and those who double down will leapfrog ahead.

Click the linkfor more information on the VO Freedom Master Plan, and to get my Thursday Move Touch Inspire Newsletter for voice actors that comes out every week, click that link as well.

Thanks so much for being a part of the conversation here on YouTube, on the VO Pro community, and in the voiceover world at large.

We hope to see you soon at MAVO in November in the Washington, D.C. area, and we hope to continue the conversation there as well.

Thanks so much for joining us and we will see you again next week.