Hi everyone,

I'm trying to get some freelance sound designer work by making a little demo and sending it out cold. I came up with a list of the sorts of companies to contact...

Music production companies (ie. who work in the music biz proper, making pop songs etc)

Videogame production companies

Multimedia production companies

Music/FX libraries

Are there any other areas where people would need freelance sound design, such as web/new media designers for example? If anyone has any ideas (or experience of working in this area) that would be much appreciated.

Also, if anyone can shed any light on how the commissioning structure works, that would be really helpful - eg. the 'boink' sound a playstation makes in setup mode.. is there someone in Sony responsible for commissioning that, or do they farm all their media work out to an agency who then get the freelancers in? i'm sure it's different in each case but a general overview would be great, thanks.

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www.myspace.com/benjunctionbox

I have no personal experience on this...but, I did put a similar question to a music-advisory-panel-thing. I arsked (something like) 'is it lucrative to get into the creation of corporate audio logos'. I put this to a guy who had music industry experience and went on to create his own audio library company.

To sum up he said something along the lines of, it is very common to find that all audio is now produced in house by the creative agency that deals with the creation, packaging, marketing, etc of products.

So all of these audio idents (orange, t-mobile, intel, etc) are usually created when they get a rebranding, or an addition to the brand (i think I remember intel 4 having a different 'jingle' to the previous?).

So in the olden days you might try to send a demo to a record lable - these days because of the developments in gaming and mobile technologies and content richness of websites, then I would suggest you might have just as good a chance if you target these ad / creative agencies with, like you say, a demo of sounds/FX/idents.

I just re-read your post and I can't offer anything else you already mention, but I can confirm what you already figured out about the 'farming out' to creative agencies. If you need a list of the most likely candidates, try getting creative review or design week, off the top of me heed. I'm sure there's another mag which does a similar thing for new media / gaming etc.

one other thing, with the development of 3G maybe there will be greater opportunities for audio on mobiles...

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"There's only 45 degrees between the Hitler and the Zombie" - me, Saturday night, in front of the speakers