Radio Imaging Demo - Joshua Swanson Voiceover
Chasing Radio Imaging jobs these days can be a real headache for a number of reasons. The first being less people are listening to radio stations which makes for tight budgets and a slowing economy adds even more incentive to cut the bottom line. Therefore the pay for the imaging voice of a station has seen a decline. Why, as a radio imaging talent, spend money on demos and marketing when the return is so little. The mere accessibility to talent these days, thanks to the internet, has also saturated the marked driving prices down. The last offer I got was $50 a month. Industry standard, as I understand it, for radio imaging voice talent in the past ranged from $500 - $1,000 per month or about $100 a page. The range was in place because the smaller the market the smaller the radio imaging voice talent budget.Yet, with all of the Station Managers and Programming Directors complaining of tight budgets Clear Channel, the biggest employer of radio imaging voiceover talent, “performed better than the industry as a whole.”
Meena Thiruvengadam
Express-News Business Writer
Are stations really hurting so much that they can’t afford to pay a living wage for radio imaging talent or are big corporations and their greed putting the squeeze on this art form? Yes, I said art form. You try and make radio imaging copy come alive and be listened to by the audience when that audience is trained to tune it out. Also, for some of the radio imaging jobs out there a God given voice is required. What makes it an art form is that not everyone can do it and do it well. The radio imaging voice is the brand of the station or the voice of the station and if you use a station intern, or pay a beginning voice talent $50 a month your station will sound like what you paid; crap. Is there still a respect for this art form or has the bottom line squeezed out any possibility of developing a radio imaging career?
How can new talent enter the playing field with so much competition and so little pay and expect to work?
What stories do successful radio imaging talent have that they can share with those on their way up?
Is there still a path to success in radio imaging?
There are still working radio imaging voice talent out there and this blog article is an open invitation to any of those talent to post their thoughts on the state of the radio imaging market.
Click Here to Download the Joshua Swanson Radio Imaging Demo
I agree! Radio Imaging is a dying ARTFORM. And it is that - a creative artform and was thriving through the 90’s and early part of this decade. With declining budgets, pd’s doing the job of 8 people with less time to focus on creativity - it has fallen to the side.
I used to persue such jobs, but the time involved to get just one radio voice over job for 100-200 per month is simply not worth it. I have focused my company to mainly commercial voice over. Every onece and a while I get the request from a PD and I will usualy do it on the cheap to help them out and even throw in whatever odd creative I can come up with on top of the copy they send.
Radio Imaging - Like many other faccts of the commercial radio industry is simply changing and evolving. Will it still exist 10 years from now - yes - just at a different capacity. Same as jocks and every other faccet of the industry. Will they all still exist. - Yes, but in differnt capacity than yesterday or today. The more one can evolve with the industry the better off they will be.
Likely there will be an even bigger push for creativity on raido commercials that stand out - and not so much on the imaging. If the creative types can move into this realm, they will survive. However many of my friends get bitter about this subject and refuse to re-mold themselves around the changing medium and simply get out of it.
Tony
http://www.bestradiocommercials.com
I revisited this post to chime in, but Tony beat me to it. Classified ads from ostensibly large-market stations are now asking for VO on the cheap, even free in some cases. It’s a trend that began even before the economy took a nosedive; one suspects, if this seeming recession doesn’t improve soon, that imaging will not return to the same status in stations’ business models.