The Middle of the VO Business is Healing

Spend enough time around the voiceover industry and you could easily come away believing there are only two kinds of careers.

There are the people who are struggling.

And there are the people who are absolutely crushing it.

One group is posting about how hard it has become to book, how rates are changing, how auditions have dried up, how AI is coming for everybody’s lunch money, and how the algorithm personally kicked their dog.

The other group just booked Nike.

Again.

Meanwhile, somewhere between those two extremes is an enormous population of voice actors quietly doing something much less dramatic: They’re making a living. Sometimes a very good one.

And lately, I think that the middle is starting to look healthy again.

Talent who may not be voicing the biggest Super Bowl spot of the year, starring in the hottest animated series, or posting screenshots of five-figure sessions every Tuesday, but who are nevertheless building sustainable businesses doing work they enjoy.

They have repeat clients. They book corporate narration, commercials, e-learning, political, medical, audiobooks, promos, indy games, explainer content, niche narration, local and regional volume work, and a thousand other things that rarely produce a red carpet.

They pay their mortgages. They take vacations. They buy groceries without needing to calculate whether the avocados are going to destroy Q3. Spoiler alert: They ARE. Avocadoes are like forty two dollars.

They have slow weeks and great weeks. Sometimes they go into the booth at 10:30 on a Wednesday, record something for a client they’ve worked with for seven years, send the invoice, and then go walk the cat. Cats need walks, right?

That’s a career. A pretty darn good one, actually.

And it’s worth remembering what happened to this part of the industry over the last several years.

Between roughly 2020 and 2023, voiceover experienced an extraordinary influx of new talent. The pandemic put millions of people at home, remote recording suddenly seemed more accessible than ever, and VO became one of those careers people looked at and thought, “Wait…I have a microphone, a closet, and people have occasionally told me I have a nice voice. Perhaps I shall now become a professional voice actor.”

And some of them absolutely did. A lot of talented people discovered VO during that period, trained seriously, built studios, learned the business, developed relationships, and are now firmly established members of the industry.

But a whole lot of other people tried it for a while and eventually discovered something longtime professionals could probably have told them, and probably did: This is harder than it looks.

Turns out the business model is slightly more complicated than purchasing a USB microphone and waiting for Pixar to call.

The result was an unusually crowded middle of the market. More demos. More auditions. More profiles. More people competing for many of the same opportunities. And while media consumption was expanding at the same time, the sudden increase in supply created a strange few years where the ecosystem felt dramatically oversaturated.

Now?

I think that is correcting itself.

The people from that pandemic-era wave who were going to stick have largely stuck. They trained. They improved. They learned how to market. They developed clients. They became professionals.

The people who discovered they didn’t particularly enjoy auditioning hundreds of times, marketing themselves, maintaining studios, learning audio, dealing with rejection, chasing invoices, and periodically wondering whether a sentence about commercial-grade HVAC ductwork should sound “more conversational”?

A lot of them moved on. That’s normal. Every gold rush eventually leaves behind the people who actually wanted to become miners. At the same time, the enormous anxiety surrounding AI has probably made voiceover less attractive to casual new entrants. Whether the threat was ever as immediate or universal as some predicted is another discussion entirely, but it certainly changed the sales pitch.

“Become a voice actor from home!” sounds slightly less irresistible when the next headline says robots will replace everyone by St. Gibbons Day. Is that actually a thing?

So, fewer people appear to be casually wandering into VO under the assumption that it is easy money. And paradoxically, that may be helping the professional middle regain some balance.

The ecosystem is healing.

Capybaras are returning to the rivers. Lobsters are appearing on more plates. Okay, mostly because I ordered them, but I digress.

Casting directors are emerging from the mist. Sigourney Weaver is feeding them bananas. It’s weird.

Somewhere, a talent just received a perfectly normal $750 corporate narration from a repeat client and did not make a LinkedIn post about it. Nature is beautiful.

This matters because social media has badly distorted our understanding of what professional success actually looks like. The middle doesn’t generate much content.

Nobody posts: “BIG NEWS! Today one of my longtime clients sent me another completely ordinary $850 job, I recorded it without incident, everyone was pleasant, and I expect to work with them again next month.”

I think a lot of talented people unnecessarily convince themselves they’re failing because their career doesn’t resemble the handful of extremely visible careers they encounter online.

That’s a terrible measurement system. The top of any industry is small. By definition. If you judge every working actor against the person voicing twenty national campaigns, every baseball player against the league’s biggest star, or every neighborhood Italian restaurant against someplace serving a twelve-course tasting menu involving edible smoke and a single emotionally complicated pea, almost everyone looks unsuccessful. Seriously, fu*k that pea. Pretentious little legume.

A healthy VO career might mean earning $60,000 a year doing work you like with tremendous flexibility.

For someone else, it might mean $150,000 spread across twenty-five repeat clients and several genres.

Someone else might make considerably more without ever becoming particularly famous within the industry because most of their business happens quietly through agents, producers, longtime clients, referrals, and direct marketing. And another talent may deliberately choose to work part-time because voiceover gives them room for parenting, another profession, travel, creative pursuits, or simply a life that doesn’t revolve around maximizing annual revenue like a techbro on ketamine.

All of those careers can be successful. The questions that matter are more personal.

Is the business sustainable? Is it moving forward? Are your rates healthy? Are your skills improving? Are you developing relationships that make tomorrow a little more predictable than yesterday?

And perhaps most importantly: Does the career support the life you actually want?

We can become so obsessed with building the biggest possible voiceover career that we forget the career was supposed to do something for us, too.

Ambition is good. Big bookings are fun. Prestige can open doors. And I’m certainly not going to pretend money is irrelevant. Ambition has paid for a lot of excellent NFL seats. Roger Goodell owns one of my kidneys. But there is enormous freedom in reaching the point where you no longer need your success to perform for other people.

A good career can be quiet. It can be repetitive in the best possible way. It can consist of clients who trust you enough that auditions largely disappear. It can have afternoons where nothing happens. It can include months where nobody in the Facebook groups knows what you’ve booked because you were too busy doing the work to announce it.

And after several years when the middle of this industry felt unusually congested, chaotic, and uncertain, I’m increasingly optimistic that we’re settling into something healthier. The tourists mostly went home. The people who fell in love with the work stayed. The professionals kept getting better. And the industry continues doing what it has always done: changing, expanding, contracting, creating new opportunities, killing old ones, and somehow generating another industrial video about cybersecurity.

There will always be people climbing. There will always be people rebuilding. There will always be spectacular success stories worth celebrating. But between the struggle posts and the highlight reels are thousands of people quietly making this thing work.

And right now, that middle may be stronger than it has looked in quite some time.

If you’re one of them, give yourself some credit. You don’t have to win the internet this week. You don’t need every booking to be a home run. Sometimes a career is built almost entirely out of singles and doubles. And if you keep making contact with the ball? You may look around one day and realize that while everyone else was busy arguing about whether the industry was dying……….you built a pretty remarkable life inside it.