Is Audiobook Casting Noisy 4? Talent Marketplace Apps, Now and Soon
Let’s cut to the chase in this last episode of the mini-series; it’s obvious where I’m going.
The Chase: Talent marketplace apps help Producer X to cast audiobooks. A lot.
Talent Marketplace Apps, Now and Soon by Eljinproductions.com
How do Talent Marketplace Apps Work?
Talent Marketplace apps are straightforward: Producer X logs into talent marketplace Y, then enters information into filters in the user interface. The parameters should be pretty standard. For example: language, genre, author, gender, base accent, experience level, skills required, fee offered, and availability dates. (If I’ve missed anything, please add it.)
A well-structured and properly-populated database will return plenty of results. Too many candidates? Narrow the search parameters. Too few? Broaden them. Results not quite right? Tweak the inputs again. One way or the other, all the necessary information has been processed quickly and in an orderly way. Bias, irrational preference or favoritism, choices borne of anxiety—they’re largely swept aside. Noise is tamped down, and intuition delayed. The producer can settle into determining which performers work best for each program. Audio clips? Available for immediate review. Auditions needed? Just send sides through the platform and auditions are on their way.
Many people already work this way, in one form or another, but it always helps to know which solutions can streamline and simplify the process.
What are the Best Talent Marketplace Apps Available?
If you’re looking to optimize the casting process, here’s a partial list of existing talent marketplace platforms to explore:
The truth is, Audible itself is a great casting resource as well.
With so many great options available, it’s pretty clear that talent marketplace apps for audiobook narrators are here to stay— and they’re getting better all the time.
What Can We Expect From the Future of Talent Marketplace Apps?
Improvements to talent marketplace platforms are sure to come. Here are some developments to look out for:
Better data: Ask motivated users—say, performers looking for work—to describe their skills and accomplishments in rich, online profiles. Trust me: You’ll get a lot of information, some of which isn’t necessarily relevant or verifiable. This clogs search results, re-creating the very statistical noise we’ve been trying to escape. So we’ll need to think further about this.
Integrations: Integrations might help. This could get over-techy very quickly, so for simplicity’s sake: We could really use applications that talk to each other in the audiobook world. These would let us integrate marketplace apps with payment apps, project management apps, social media apps, and retail apps—or whatever apps you’d like. Big plus: improved data. Talent marketplaces could draw on genuinely verifiable information: program sales, payments for completed projects, customer reviews, cataloged performances.
Ratings: What platform doesn’t use ratings? Gotta have them—both to advertise excellence and to identify less-than-stellar collaboration. This would include 360-degree reviews, evaluating not simply performers but producers and other vendors. A recipe for controversy? Sure. But if you want ratings (and better data, I’d argue), I don’t see how that’s avoidable.
Weighting: When you cast, you’re setting priorities. For software, that means we’ll have to develop weighting rules, ways of meeting one priority before another but behind yet another—for example, budget first, due date second, experience in a given genre third. Changing the order of priorities alters the results of the search. I asked my friend Huw Price of Curiosity Software about weighting rules in a casting application. His view: “Plenty of software out there to do it. Setting it up is quite hard work and then tuning it will be fun!” I’d bet it’s worth doing.
Talent Marketplace Apps Are Worth Your Time
A couple of months ago, I said of talent marketplace applications:
Keep up with them. They aren’t going away. They’re too useful as casting engines for publishers and producers, too much a source of opportunity and FOMO for narrators.
I stand by that. Given the amount of casting that’s done, there’s little alternative to them. These apps aggregate entire communities of performers and tag individual users with searchable metadata. They make audiobook casting (indeed, voiceover casting of any kind) manageable and head-spinningly fast.
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