Did you get this email too? Apparently somewhere along the line, I must’ve expressed an interest in knowing more about this proposed VO casting site.
Now they want to know if my interest is serious.
From the email: “As we gravitate to finalizing the roster, I am reaching out to you to confirm you are still interested in participating with us as one of our Talents. We have received a great amount of positive feedback on this project and look forward to working with you. Please see attached a very simple agreement for you to fill in your Talent Name, Alias ( if you desire to use one), and Date the form. This will serve as signature, and agreement to terms. If we do not get the agreement back from you, we can not add you to the roster.”
This is the agreement they want talents to sign: VoiceHoundsTalentAgreement0315. ‘Worth looking at closely.
Notice they offer a generous (?) 65% payout on jobs.
I didn’t even remember this site being on my radar…so I wrote back and asked:
“…Thanks for checking with me. Is there a current website that states your TOS, or business plan?
I’d like to know what the compensation rates are, or how you plan to run VoiceHounds in terms of well…. a lot of things. Do you take a commission? Do you prevent talent from working directly with the client after initial contact? How do you match talent with seekers?…is there a formula like (ahem) other Pay-to-Plays? Perhaps you have a doc that explains all this already?
Thanks in advance for your consideration of my concerns.”
Paul Smith, Talent Manager/Development was quick to reply within hours. I appreciated his straightforward answer:
“It’s not p2p site. It’s just a 35% cut for the company to pay sales staff, web hosting costs, business costs, and the credit card processing of 3.5%.
Simple vo projects for the clients that want something other than the local radio stations to voice their stuff for free and sound like everything else on the stations…but not too much production costs to knock them out of the loop for fresh talent. There is no working directly with the client scenarios on this service and the simple agreement forwarded to you today spells that out. For some it’s a great fit.
We’re working for a volume business.”
