We all know how to check audition listings on classicalsinger.com and network on Facebook. But there are many websites where people go to offer and find work—sites that are not already glutted with singers. If you think outside the audition box and start thinking of yourself as a freelancer or contractor, you can discover a new whole world of places to get hired.
Fiverr
www.fiverr.com
What would you do for five dollars?
The more accurate question is what would you do for four dollars, since Fiverr takes a one-dollar cut. But you get the picture. Sellers post a “gig” where they offer a service for five dollars. Buyers browse through the offerings and purchase a service. The seller delivers and gets paid.
Doesn’t sound too lucrative? There are two things that can make the investment of your time worthwhile: upsells and quantity.
Upselling means adding additional or premium services that cost more. For example, you could sing a song for one minute for five bucks, but you could sing a five-minute song for $20. Or you could add instruments or production or video or customization or rush delivery.
On the other hand, if you offer an interesting enough service, you could make bank on quantity. Sure, four bucks isn’t that exciting, but is it something you can do 200 times a month? Now it’s getting interesting.
Of course it will take some creativity to generate enough interest. There is already an entire “Music and Audio” category, containing subgroups such as Jingles, Voicemail Greetings, Songwriting, Narration and Voice-Over, and Music Lessons. What can you think of that hasn’t been done already?
And if you think a custom “Happy Birthday” is the trick, let me warn you that there are 5,787 results for a “Happy Birthday” search on Fiverr, including having it sung by Elmo, a man in the shower, a Marilyn Monroe impressionist, a man in a Speedo, an Elvis impersonator, a man dressed as an English knight, a lady doing death metal screams, a man in a bubble bath, a dog . . . and that’s just the first page of results. Back to the drawing board.
Elance
www.elance.com
Elance is the most well known of several sites that hook up would-be freelancers with would-be employers. In the December 2010 Tech-Savvy bonus web article (available in the online archives), we discussed using these sites as an employer (“The Tech-Savvy Singer: Outsource Your Work to India?”). But you also might find use of it as a freelancer.
It works like this: Start a freelancer account. Create a profile and add portfolio. Bid on jobs. Win the bid and sign a contract. The employer puts your payment into an escrow. When the work is done, the employer releases the money and you get paid (minus a cut, of course).
The bidding process can work one of two ways: you can browse projects and contact the employer to bid or they can browse freelancers and contact you to ask you to bid on their project. Either way, you should probably put together a pretty nice profile and portfolio.
So do singers use this? Yep. The “Design and Multimedia” category is where the musicians live—and while they are mostly composers and audio engineers, you will find singers there as well. This skill is usually paired with voiceover talent and, occasionally, with songwriting or production.
Freelancers on Elance are usually (but not always!) hired remotely, so in order to get hired as a session singer you need to have your own professional recording equipment at home. If a company is willing to pay you money to work on a project with an actual budget, they’re going to expect a high-quality product from you, and that doesn’t just mean that you’re a high-quality singer. It means you are giving them something their audio engineers can turn into a finished product without wanting to hunt you down and beat you for giving them low-quality audio. Alternatively, if they’re offering you enough, you could take the project to a local recording studio and pay for your time there or even see if the employer will reimburse you for studio time as part of the contract.
A common complaint about sites such as Elance is that putting yourself on such a global market means getting undercut by bids from those in lower-income countries. And now you have the same problem as auto manufacturers and telephone operators. Hopefully your language skills can set you apart from the competition—if the project involves singing in English, you’ll be miles ahead of a singer in China.
Craigslist
www.craigslist.com
Everybody in the pool! Craigslist is your one-stop shop for selling your furniture, meeting potentially crazy roommates, and getting murdered in a hotel room. But it’s a matter of quantity over quality. Like Facebook, everyone is here, so no matter how much of a pain it is, it’s worth taking the bad with the good.
You actually can find paying gigs on Craigslist, as well as musical collaborators. You might bump into a few dead ends first, but people are putting gigs out there because they don’t know where else to put them. I got hired to sing the national anthem at a nursing school’s commencement ceremony. Do you think the human resources lady charged with hiring someone knew about the audition listings on classicalsinger.com? Of course not! She just posted on Craigslist and hoped for the best (which I like to imagine she got).
The challenge is the immensity of Craigslist. There are so many posts that few people have time to wade through everything that could possibly be relevant, especially if you live in a big urban center like New York, where there are more posts because there are more people.
So how to keep on top of potential gigs? The simplest method is to set aside time (each day, each week—depends on how actively you’re seeking gigs and how well what you’re finding on Craigslist fits your needs) to scroll through and apply.
If that’s too time consuming or leaves you with too much of a delay to take advantage of time-sensitive offers, it is possible to set up alerts. Craigslist does not offer a built-in alert system, but this is a service that’s in demand enough for third parties to get involved. List-Alert (www.list-alert.com) provides a simple interface to define your search and have it e-mailed to you. You can enter text to search for as well as the category, city, and minimum/maximum cost. The search results are displayed without you having to sign up for anything. If it all looks good, you can enter your email address and your alert is created. There is also an iDevice/Android app called Craigslist Pro (www.escargotstudios.com/craigspro) that, for $1.99, offers this feature in addition to a generally improved mobile Craigslist experience—at least, as far as browsing and searching goes. The app can’t find your “missed connection” for you.
If you don’t have time for all of this but have a friend who does, lucky you! I don’t make a habit of patrolling Craigslist, but I have friends in related but different areas—rock musicians, mostly—who will send me ads that don’t pertain to them but make them think of me. After all, they’re in there anyways and they’re not going to be competing against me for an opera gig. If that’s your situation, say thank you. And, when you’re scouting about yourself, pay it forward!
None of these sites alone is enough to make or break your career, but changing the way you think about gigs—and changing the way you think of yourself as a professional (a freelancer and a contractor)—can be the first step in breaking away from the struggling masses fighting for every last YAP slot and becoming a pro singer with a self-guided career path.
