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Audio Work Slowdown?
With the current world economic situation has others noticed any slow down in work yet?
I am assuming this will have an effect world wide.
If and when it happens what ideas do people have in mind?
Do you chase harder for jobs?, lower your charges just to get the work?, Look for alternate work? or even persue new audio ideas? -
3 Replies
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Hello Brian and welcome to the Cow Audio Forum.
The crickets are getting louder.
Regards,
Ty Ford
Want better production audio?: Ty Ford’s Audio Bootcamp Field Guide
Watch Ty play guitar -
Too early to tell here (or maybe it’s the wrong season). We have the Super Bowl, Daytona 500 and baseball spring training just around the corner. I’ll be able to give you a better assessment after that. Last year to date was fairly normal.
One piece of advice, if you advertise your work at a lower rate, it’s much harder to bring it up later. However, you have to eat and keep a roof over your head, so you do what you have to do. But lowering your rates can hurt other sound mixers in your area in the long run – my fear is that it becomes a downward spiral of continually offering the lower price to get the work.
Let’s get a government bailout for the location sound mixer industry! Hmm… how can I convert my business to banking holding status…
Freelance Sound Technician/Mixer
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Wow! I’m so glad I ran across this board today! Read and commented on three threads so far. All great information!
Yes…the crickets ARE getting louder (but I’ll deal with them with my Izotope Rx and a nice steep Q around 5.2k).
Bailouts for hardworking audio pro’s would be kindly accepted, yes. Haha.
I second (and third and fourth…) Rodney’s valuable(!) comment:
“One piece of advice, if you advertise your work at a lower rate, it’s much harder to bring it up later. However, you have to eat and keep a roof over your head, so you do what you have to do. But lowering your rates can hurt other sound mixers in your area in the long run – my fear is that it becomes a downward spiral of continually offering the lower price to get the work.”My studio manager has run into that very problem a couple times. Once you drop rates, clients expect to pay that again in the future. It is a tough game, bidding and quoting, and doing. And, yes, rate drops affect everyone because then EVERYONE has to try to play in the same ballpark if they wanna play ball. (at least operators/facilities of a certain size/workload)
We have a fair number of things coming in for ‘sweetening’ of FCP and Avid edits, and they can be a chore and at some point, the audio (audio-only) pro’s have to just shrug their shoulders at the amount of audio inside some edits these days. SOME are bypassing audio post entirely based on budgets, and it is all done within the video edit system.
Not slagging it; just pointing out facts. I have to brush up on my FCP chops!!! Might be ‘job security’ soon!
😉
“Sounds good!….I think?”
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