I’ve been involved in the VO world for decades and have watched it change dramatically, then become commercially disrupted and change again, then socially and change again.
In the entirely different world of the 1960’s and 70’s voice-over artists were a neat little boutique extension of the entertainment business, who worked mostly out of three cites: New York (by far the largest market), Chicago and LA.
To be a VO talent was to be represented by a union talent agency and be a card-carrying SAG and AFTRA member. Your agent brought you into their offices several times per week to record demos of radio and TV commercial copy, then the tape operator edited several auditions together onto a reel-to-reel tape and messengered it over to the advertising agency for review and hopefully, a booking.
There were stars in the voice-over world, quite different from any other types. They were only known to the agencies and each other and enjoyed both the faceless anonymity of being regular people in the outside world, but also made gobs of money with ongoing campaigns that could pay residuals as high as a quarter million per year, per campaign. Which, if you were really hot, could be one of a dozen you’d nabbed and could go on for years. I recently met the woman who played Charley Tuna’s girlfriend for Starkist Tuna, back in the 70’s. That gig netted a house and a college education for her kids.
By the 1980’s, voice-over got a suddenly glitzier with the advent of major TV and screen stars landing million-dollar contracts to become the voice of big and luxury brands. It gave the brand a sheen to be associated with a premier voice and it gave the VO business a deep and fearful shudder to see a significant portion of its rank and file actors being shunted aside for in the name of glamor.
By 2000, digital recording made it possible to record from casually constructed home recording setups, then submit via the internet to your agency, which would assemble a digital link to send off to the client, now anywhere on earth.
And by 2010, entirely digital agencies had established such an internet stronghold, that many traditional agencies dried up, replaced by direct-to-client business models via digital handshake, repeated thousands of times per day.
Today, with something like 500 hours of video getting posted online per minute, voiceover is anyone making a smartphone video and talking over the picture. It’s turned the cultural tonality of voice recording into a much more casual overall style and created dozens of sub-genres, ubiquitous on a web that seems second only to the infinitely expanding universe out there in space.
Where outer-worlders are undoubtedly listening.
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