The Future of Voices as an Audio Services Marketplace

David Ciccarelli

January 24, 2021

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Dear Voices Talent,

I hope this message finds you well today.

Over the last year, we’ve been dreaming about how to make your experience working with Voices even better, more exciting and most importantly, to help you get more work opportunities.

Recognizing the number of gifts and skills that you bring to the table, and hearing from clients about what they need more and more of, I’m pleased to announce that we’re adding three new categories of work (or, services) on our audio services marketplace that you will be able to apply for, launching later this year.

The new services are:

• Audio Production
• Music
• Translation

Just as in the beginning our mission was to connect you with clients hiring great voice over talent, we see a similar opportunity to live out that mission by helping bring more creatives together.

Each of these services has over a dozen skills associated with it, so there will be no shortage of ways for you to apply your skills.

To give you a taste of what’s coming, let’s start with voice over.

As you know, there are presently 13 areas of work that you can include on your profile. What we’re doing now is getting more granular and offering you the opportunity to upload demos in very specific areas that meet the needs of clients with very specific requirements.

Today, Business is a catchall category for all narration specific to business purposes. In the future, you will be able to update your profile to say that you can record for any number of voice over skills, including (but not limited to):

• Medical narration
• Audiobook narration
• Corporate Narration
• Documentary Narration
• eLearning Narration

If we’ve missed a skill, let me know in the comments below.

Want to get ahead of the launch? While you’ve got at least five months of lead time, we’ve created a short To Do List to help you prepare before jobs start getting posted into the new services:

1. Review the content of your profile
2. Recategorizing existing demos to match with new skills
3. Upload new demos where you have experience

For those of you who offer voice over exclusively, you will continue to see voice over jobs show up in your inbox every day. Voice over is, and will continue to be, the foundation of Voices.

By encouraging you to showcase all the skills you have to offer, more clients will post their jobs to our audio services marketplace to meet their needs. In addition to new clientele, we look forward to welcoming experts in audio production, music composition and translation over the next several months.

Starting now, you will see a variety of updates and changes to your experience, the first of which is today’s update to Talent Profiles. We’ll share more information with you about future changes when they are ready for you to experience and enjoy. For now, as part of our announcement, I’ll be sharing with you our Product Roadmap, which acts as our high-level plan for the year.

If you like to hear more, please join me on Friday, January 29th at 1:00PM EST, for a live Q&A Session, during which I’ll expand upon the news I’ve shared with you today and answer any questions you might have. You’ll find the link for where to register at the bottom of this announcement, but first, I wanted to share more information about our plans for 2021 with you.

Voices.com is Now Voices

With this shift toward becoming an audio services marketplace, we felt that now was the perfect time to give ourselves a bit of a refresh. As part of our growth, we want people to see us as a place where they can as clients find, and as talent share, their creative voice. For this reason, moving forward, we are now Voices.

With an updated name comes an updated look. Here it is!

Over the next several weeks and months, you will begin to see this new name and look across our site and our social media accounts. We know it’s not a significant change from how we present ourselves today, but we feel it embodies and aligns with our decision to become an audio services marketplace that is more than just a website; we’re a community of voices. 

One of the places you may have already noticed this change is our blog, where we now have categorized our content by these new services:

We will have much more to share with you about this refresh over the coming weeks, so stay tuned. 

A Closer Look at our Plans for 2021

The process of becoming an audio services marketplace will take time. Our goal is to see jobs in these new creative services posted on our marketplace by the second half of the year. In the build-up to that time, and afterward, there are a number of things we want to do to ensure we provide both clients and talent working in these new services with the same great experience they have come to expect from what Voices offers today. In an effort to show you exactly what we plan to do to achieve that, we are, for the first time, sharing our Product Roadmap with you:

Think of this as the map we will be using to get us to our next destination: becoming an audio services marketplace. There is a lot more we have in store for you and our clients that we aren’t quite ready or able to share with you today, but what you see here is our high-level plan. 

We want to be clear about what you can expect to see over the next twelve months, and we want to encourage you to provide us with feedback throughout this process so we can constantly work to improve and bring you more and more value for your time, effort, and support. 
Today’s Talent Profile release represents the first of many major milestones that we hope to reach. We can’t wait to hear what you think and to show you what we have in store for you this year.

How You Can Help Us Shape Our Year

We want to hear from you. If you want to hear more, feel free to join our Live Q&A Session (YouTube recording), post in the comments section below, or email us your thoughts at [email protected]. We’ve also added some quick Q&As to the bottom of this article, as well as created a longer form Q&A blog post here. Also, whenever we release a new feature or update, like the new Talent Profiles, let us know what you think by emailing our Product Team at [email protected]. 

From all of us at Voices, we thank you for your continued support and can’t wait to show you what we have in store for this year.

Quick Q&A 

Since adding more services to the site, does this mean that you’re moving away from voice over?

Voice over will always be at our core. It’s where we started, it’s what we know best and it is what the majority of our community provides. Our name is Voices after all.

If I only offer voice over, why am I paying full price for Voices Premium while only taking advantage of one of the four services you offer?

We have a simple guiding principle: one Premium membership, all services. That said, voice over has features such as the Top 100, statistics in addition to a comprehensive collection of resources tailored to helping develop the careers of voice talent. Most importantly, your Premium membership provides you with access to all of the services of work. You will be able to showcase a portfolio of work in any of the services now and in the future. 

Will I have to purchase a separate membership for each service I offer? 

No. A Voices Premium or Voices Platinum membership unlocks the ability to add any service and skill to your profile and eventually, be matched to jobs posted in each service that you have experience in.

Will the platform fee be changing depending on the job the Service is posted for?

No. There are no plans to change the platform fee.

Will the price of Voices Premium or Voices Platinum be changing depending on how many services I offer?

No. We’re not offering a different price for the Premium or Platinum membership depending on how many services you offer. As mentioned above, one Premium membership gives you access to all services and skills.

Do I have to offer these new services?

No. The decision to add these services and skills to your profile and offer them to clients in the future is entirely up to you. If you feel as though you possess the necessary skills to offer them at a competitive level of quality with the relevant samples to demonstrate that level of quality, then we’d encourage you to do that so you can be matched to jobs in the future. As always, we trust you to represent your talent and capabilities as best you can. 

Read more questions and answers about the future of Voices.

David Ciccarelli

David Ciccarelli is the Founder and Chief Executive Officer of Voices. As CEO, he is responsible for setting the vision, executing the growth strategy and managing the company on a day-to-day basis. He's been a finalist of the EY Entrepreneur of the Year Award and a Canadian Innovator Award. He often writes about his entrepreneurial journey in the Wall Street Journal, Entrepreneur, Forbes and for M.I.T. Executive Education. He graduated with honors from the Ontario Institute of Audio Recording Technology and is a graduate of Harvard Business School.

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