Finding work as a musician, engineer, producer, or songwriter can often be stressful. Especially considering how the market is very limited these days with quarantine keeping everyone at home. But when keeping that in mind, it’s easy to see that remote job-seeking might prove beneficial for some people. With that being said, this article will talk about finding work using AirGigs, an online job-seeking platform that could help you find musicians to collaborate with. This platform isn’t just a small time place with a limited number of users. It mainly provides two categories to members, eMembers and eTalents. Individuals who have amassed at least 15 major label credits are classified as eTalents, while the rest being eMembers. Some notable eTalents on the site include bassists Tony Levin and Harvey Brooks. The platform makes it so that you can request mentoring and playbacks by them. As for posting jobs on the platform and accepting them, that’s what this article is going to be all about.
Methods
There are two methods in which you can find a few musicians to work with. Considering how it’s often hard to find a good match on such websites, the first method may take a bit longer. The first method consists of posting the job on the job board and waiting for clients to contact you. This has its own pros and cons, its pros being that it’s the simplest way to find potential clients to work with. Especially considering how it’s not time consuming at all and you can reach a lot of people.
The other method is the one that could take a bit more effort but will surely garner you more results than the latter method. This would be searching the AirGigs database for musicians and directly contacting them. As you probably thought, this could take some time and you may want to do some cold calls in the process. However, you already have a reach on people who are interested in collaborating, this is a big step forward in finding potential clients to work with. You can utilize the filter on the platform to get to know the exact type of clients you need and specify the type of instruments you need as well. This will give you decent control on who you work with and what kind of music you’ll be getting from this. The database has a variety of artists and a large selection that you can choose from, so if you need something specific, try searching for it, and it’s very like going to be there. You could also filter out specific budgets and find people that are within your budget to work with, this can prove very time efficient and can save you a lot of time in deciding whom to collaborate with.
How to Use the Site
Onto the mechanics of the site, the search results are often listed on tiles of 16 matching entries. This includes a photo and an audio sample from the artist. You can go through these to take a look at your choices. However, there are some minor issues. One is that hitting ‘Back’ on your browser will redirect you back to the dashboard instead of taking you to the last page of the search results. Another small issue is that the audio samples are often not enough for you to make a sound judgement on who to pick. Very often, when trying to find someone to collaborate with you, you need to make a solid judgement based on multiple samples of what they work with. This either means that they need to be adding more samples, or the samples themselves should contain as much of what you have to offer within it at once. The latter could be pretty difficult for artists considering how it’s not realistic to include all their styles and sounds into one sample. Unless you’re already familiar with an artist, it would be difficult to get an accurate representation of someone’s work considering how you’re going to have to rely on that one sample.
Work Requests
After choosing someone that you could be comfortable working with, sending them a work request would be the next step to finding your collaboration. It’s free to request work from eMembers, however, requests sent to eTalents will bring you down about $25. There’s also the option to subscribe which will provide you with three different subscription tiers and options. The benefits you’ll get from this include free work requests per month. This is mostly so the high tier musiciens don’t get overwhelmed with work requests considering they are pretty high in demand.
Once you send a work request, the artist could either decline or accept the offer. If they do accept the offer, they would send you an offer back detailing the prices for your specific request and the time in which they can get it done. You could even negotiate the prices in the negotiations page if they seem unreasonable. Once that is done, you will have to pay an upfront charge of half of the total requested. The other half would be paid right after you receive the finished files.
Conclusion
AirGigs is a very useful tool to find reliable musicians to work with. With its broad selection database, it’s very likely that you’ll be able to find the talent that you need. Try the tool out for yourself here. For more articles such as this, visit Mello Studio’s website.
