How do you find work? Boring. Ba-da-boom. No, seriously… it’s easy to fall into the sense that what live-sound mixers do is incredibly unique. After all, at the apex of the profession, they’re responsible for making the music industry’s top artists sound as good as possible every moment on stage while at the same time being responsible for making sure the 16-year-old girl in the 35th row of section D gets every bit of value and pleasure out of the $105 earned from babysitting that she spent on that ticket. Further down the food chain, the glamour may diminish somewhat, but not the responsibility — every Friday night has a story, and whoever is mixing sound is in charge of its soundtrack.
But in a larger sense, the front-of-house and monitor mixer are members of a growing army of audio professionals, an ever-larger percentage of whom are waving diplomas and certificates in the air, hoping to attract attention and a job. They’re part of what might be the single largest cohort of self-employed in American history — in 2015, 15 million people, or 10.1 percent of total U.S. employment, were self-employed, according to the latest numbers from the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But that’s certainly low — even the BLS hedges their numbers by noting that many freelancers turn into corporations themselves, usually for tax purposes, and thus show up on their own tax returns as employees of themselves. And there was also that little thing called the Great Recession in there, skewing numbers.
More realistic might be data from a study conducted by software company Intuit that predicted that by 2020, more than 40 percent of the U.S. workforce — more than 60 million people — will be so-called “contingent workers.”
Meet The Apps
Like many areas of specialty, touring entertainment technicians now have a number of online employment portals to use for job searches. Crewspace (crewspace.com), an invitation-only portal, asserts 17,000-plus members; BobNet (bobnet.rocks) describes itself as “a closed and exclusive community” and admonishes members to keep listings within the network; TourReady (tourready.com), in La Mirada, CA is the sleekest of these sites, with online freelancer-availability calendars, industry-specific search filters, video resumes and a mobile app.
Joey Gallagher, co-owner with his father of Gallagher Staging and Productions, says TourReady was borne out of frustration with the ad hoc manner in which so many events and tours hired the diverse array of professionals they need — including him. “A lot of calls tend to come in last minute, asking, ‘Do I know someone who does this or that,’ or someone looking for work,” he says. Gallagher felt he was becoming a de facto hub himself, and saw an opportunity to match that need with a more app-based technology approach. When I asked if TourReady is intended to be the Yelp of touring, he responded, “Exactly!”
That includes using Yelp-like filters on the app, which can narrow down the type and scope of jobs and projects, and of applicants’ experience and expertise. It reflects one of the big challenges he sees in the industry today: a growing pool of potential workers, whose numbers are being swelled now that the media-arts schools are including touring subjects in their curricula, like live-sound mixing, coupled with a very wide range of competency that’s almost impossible to objectively judge. And they’re all coming into a business whose models are changing, with fewer but bigger tours and more emphasis on limited-run festivals.
When put that way, the question almost becomes, how can you not look to app-based, or at least online, solutions for matching people and projects? For the same reason that the culture has turned to Tinder (or Grindr — hey, we’re not judging) to create the connectedness necessary for personal relationships, the industry has become big and diffuse enough to warrant its own cloud-based connection services.
FOH? Not So Much
These online shape-up portals include pro-audio categories, including FOH and monitor mixers. However, many veterans of these verticals tend to use their own curated grapevines to look for work. “I personally have never received a job, or lead on any job, from any Internet sources,” Ken “Pooch” Van Druten, Linkin Park’s longtime FOH engineer, wrote in an email. “Doesn’t mean that they are not valid. I think that there are some people that get jobs on BobNet. My work comes word-of-mouth. I stay in touch with relationships, and the work seems to come to me.” Kirk Kelsey, who’s mixed for 3 Doors Down, says he’s heard of mixed outcomes from online employment sites. “I know of a few production people filling backline tech positions, with a few nightmares included,” he says. “I’ve never had any FOH gigs come from a website personally, though.”
Granted, that’s hardly a representative sample, and it’s likely that the idea of using app-based resources for finding work will become more widely accepted as the FOH cohort grows younger over time. If the history of technology tells us anything, it’s that we’ll likely see a plethora of these app-based services sprout in coming years. That raises questions — or should — about their motivations. Right now, the field is leaning towards altruism; Gallagher told me that he’s funded TourReady largely by himself but is planning on adding some advertising to the site in the very near future, to help offset development costs. But if there’s a market here — he says his own database has over 30,000 crew names in it — expect other entities to enter the market, some of which may not have any background in touring expertise but perhaps plenty in online marketing and monetization. That’s not necessarily a bad thing — think Angie’s List, which has no inherent competencies other than marketing and search-engine expertise, and now makes its money through advertising and referrals (its former subscription model was undercut by online competition). But it will also mean that the doctrine of caveat emptor will become more important.
For now, the online work-search universe is largely run by people a lot like you. That will change, because the live-event business is only going to get bigger. But the models for it are being built all around it. So even if every gig you’ll ever get came from less than six degrees of Kevin Bacon, just remember that it may not be that way forever.
