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This is a huge issue in the voice acting community. Been frequent recent discussions over at https://www.reddit.com/r/VoiceActing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/Voic

by geuis 3y ago

This is a huge issue in the voice acting community. Been frequent recent discussions over at https://www.reddit.com/r/VoiceActing/ https://www.reddit.com/r/VoiceActing/. For what its worth, most of the cost of audiobooks doesn't come from paying talent. For intermediate level actors, the going rate is around $50-$100 per finished hour (PFH) and experienced actors it can be around $250-$300. This page does a decent job of laying out pay structures for audiobooks: https://speechify.com/blog/whats-the-meaning-of-per-finished-hour-pfh https://speechify.com/blog/whats-the-meaning-of-per-finished... An 8 hour audio book might cost the author/producer about $1800-$2k. Just talking about Audible exclusively, they take about %50 of sales. But it's kinda wishy washy about exactly how much an author will earn in royalties. It's not as much as you might think. Good article from an author here that lays out some sales numbers: https://selfpublishingadvice.org/how-audiobook-authors-are-paid-by-audible-acx/ https://selfpublishingadvice.org/how-audiobook-authors-are-p... The other way that a narrator can get paid is called royalty share. That means the author/producer doesn't pay the narrator anything up front and the voice actor then relies on a small percent of each book sale to get paid. Theoretically, if an audiobook ends up really taking off then the narrator potentially could make a lot of money. But that rarely happens. Most audiobooks that you find on Audible have very, very low sales volumes. To sum it up, it doesn't occur to lost of audiobook fans but voice acting is a very competitive industry. It takes a lot of work to make a name for yourself, and even then the most successful actors probably aren't making much more than a highly paid software engineer. For most wannabe voice actors (including myself), its something you do more for love than necessarily to make a career out of it. Though of course, lots of people do but not the majority. This is all why I'm personally not a fan of these voice generation models. It's going to eventually make this niche industry non-competitive for real humans except for the talent that is already established. People keep blaming the actors as being too expensive when most are barely making it without secondary jobs.

justapassenger 3y ago
There’s also a different possible take on this. Voice acting seems to be really bad career, so eliminating that job is desired, if you can deliver same quality/better product for cheaper to customers, without requiring employees to be underpaid. I know it sucks for people in that industry, but technical progress always eliminates jobs. Calculator used to be a job, now it’s a device.
- TeMPOraL 3y ago
  Caveat though: > if you can deliver same quality/better product for cheaper to customers, without requiring employees to be underpaid. This almost never happens. Cheaper? Yes. Same or better quality? Not a chance. Automated solutions tend to allow reducing quality way below what humans workers would want to do, or even could cheaply and reliably (i.e. doing worse job than a careless one takes actual effort/skill). Like with every other case of automation replacing humans, expect the quality to be pushed down to minimum tolerable levels, as this is the point that maximizes revenue.
  - theptip 3y ago
    Perhaps it's not the bar the GP was applying, but I think "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite empowering for consumers. Consider all of the people that can't currently afford Audible, but who would like to listen to audio books while they commute to work, for example. And of course, nothing stops you from paying what we pay now for human voice actors if there continues to be a quality differential that customers care about. (Though perhaps Baumol's Cost Disease would push the price up for today's human-generated quality.) Extrapolating further -- if the commoditized version of audio books is AI generated voice, perhaps the new job for voice actors is human narrating/acting of AI-generated content for personalized stories ('Ractives from Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age"). Who knows, human voice actors could become more in demand, not less. To be clear I wouldn't forecast this as the most likely outcome, just pointing out that there are many possible outcomes.
    - TeMPOraL 3y ago
      > I think "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite empowering for consumers. That's the thing though - it's not as empowering as it seems longer-term, because the "good enough" quickly drops to "barely fit for purpose"/"if it were any worse, it would be illegal to market or sell". This has been the case with most established classes of products I can think of, including pretty much anything that's been fully commoditized. And so > nothing stops you from paying what we pay now for human voice actors if there continues to be a quality differential that customers care about. (Though perhaps Baumol's Cost Disease would push the price up for today's human-generated quality.) Nothing stops me today. But even if the quality differential exists, the dropping price on the low-quality version will reduce demand on the moderate-quality version, pushing its prices up and reducing number of suppliers (here, voice actors). The end result seems to always be a bifurcation: there is not enough demand to sustain a business doing decent quality work for a reasonable price, so all companies move to providing either low quality work cheaply, or high quality work at a hefty premium. The middle disappears. In the specific context of this thread, the middle in question is the current quality of audiobooks with voice acting. The quality level available to most consumers will be below that, and the next step up will be niche recordings at high cost.
8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago
Sounds like the voice acting community is going to join the taxi driver community in the near future.

by geuis 3y ago

justapassenger 3y ago

There’s also a different possible take on this. Voice acting seems to be really bad career, so eliminating that job is desired, if you can deliver same quality/better product for cheaper to customers, without requiring employees to be underpaid. I know it sucks for people in that industry, but technical progress always eliminates jobs. Calculator used to be a job, now it’s a device.

TeMPOraL 3y ago
Caveat though: > if you can deliver same quality/better product for cheaper to customers, without requiring employees to be underpaid. This almost never happens. Cheaper? Yes. Same or better quality? Not a chance. Automated solutions tend to allow reducing quality way below what humans workers would want to do, or even could cheaply and reliably (i.e. doing worse job than a careless one takes actual effort/skill). Like with every other case of automation replacing humans, expect the quality to be pushed down to minimum tolerable levels, as this is the point that maximizes revenue.
- theptip 3y ago
  Perhaps it's not the bar the GP was applying, but I think "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite empowering for consumers. Consider all of the people that can't currently afford Audible, but who would like to listen to audio books while they commute to work, for example. And of course, nothing stops you from paying what we pay now for human voice actors if there continues to be a quality differential that customers care about. (Though perhaps Baumol's Cost Disease would push the price up for today's human-generated quality.) Extrapolating further -- if the commoditized version of audio books is AI generated voice, perhaps the new job for voice actors is human narrating/acting of AI-generated content for personalized stories ('Ractives from Stephenson's book "The Diamond Age"). Who knows, human voice actors could become more in demand, not less. To be clear I wouldn't forecast this as the most likely outcome, just pointing out that there are many possible outcomes.
  - TeMPOraL 3y ago
    > I think "good enough at 1/10 the price" is quite empowering for consumers. That's the thing though - it's not as empowering as it seems longer-term, because the "good enough" quickly drops to "barely fit for purpose"/"if it were any worse, it would be illegal to market or sell". This has been the case with most established classes of products I can think of, including pretty much anything that's been fully commoditized. And so > nothing stops you from paying what we pay now for human voice actors if there continues to be a quality differential that customers care about. (Though perhaps Baumol's Cost Disease would push the price up for today's human-generated quality.) Nothing stops me today. But even if the quality differential exists, the dropping price on the low-quality version will reduce demand on the moderate-quality version, pushing its prices up and reducing number of suppliers (here, voice actors). The end result seems to always be a bifurcation: there is not enough demand to sustain a business doing decent quality work for a reasonable price, so all companies move to providing either low quality work cheaply, or high quality work at a hefty premium. The middle disappears. In the specific context of this thread, the middle in question is the current quality of audiobooks with voice acting. The quality level available to most consumers will be below that, and the next step up will be niche recordings at high cost.

8f2ab37a-ed6c 3y ago

Sounds like the voice acting community is going to join the taxi driver community in the near future.