The Quiet Work: An Engineer’s Reflection on Influence, Credit and Culture
Part One – The Engineer as an Influencer
This is a three-part think piece on the changing landscape of acquiring musical projects and growing our portfolios as audio engineers. My experience is based on my career in Australia, and it doesn’t necessarily reflect the careers of engineers globally. Australia is a small market, and it is common to take on many roles to earn an income.
Part one of this series contemplates the influencer age of the creative industry; how we need to market ourselves online, using reels, TikTok and the like as marketing tools, and how compatible it is with audio engineering. Part two contemplates the importance of crediting, the transition from CD jackets to online crediting platforms and the introduction of engineer charts. Part three contemplates the comparative culture of the charts, tall poppy syndrome amongst engineers in Australia, and the effects on our mental health. I hope this supports consideration of our current landscape and the evolving industry we find ourselves a part of.
The Shift in How We Get Work
When I was first being mentored as a young mastering engineer, I was told, “Let your work speak for itself. Then the work—and the awards—will come. Don’t waste time shmoozing at industry events and putting yourself out there to get work.” At that time, I was a few years into my career, training under someone who’d made their name back in the ‘heyday’ of the industry, with ARIA awards and Grammy nominations decorating the walls and halls of the studio we worked in. It was advice based on an era that had long gone, an era before being connected through technology 24/7, and when markets weren’t oversaturated with engineers and artists. Fewer people were in engineering roles back then, it was less accessible, and you had to cut your teeth in a music studio.
The new accessibility to the creative arts is wonderful, anyone can do it by doing online courses and having home DIY setups. Music studios arguably aren’t a requirement anymore.
Like with any freelance job, you’ve always had to market yourself to get work. The older way of doing that was based around face-to-face relationships, mainly with labels and A&R managers, where you built trust, and they’d keep coming back with projects. That still happens, you maintain good relationships with your artists, and ideally, if they like your work, they keep coming back. The difference now is that there is a larger number of independent artists, and growing connections involve following each other on social media, liking and commenting on their posts, often never meeting in real life, but connected through the web. As a mastering engineer, we don’t require attended sessions, most work is done alone. I’ve only met a handful of my clients in my career.
On the plus side, having social media and marketing through it has allowed me to grow a global audience, I’ve worked on songs from Hong Kong, Tanzania, Chile, London and more. I don’t think I would have connected with artists across the globe without the internet, not this early in my career. Social media has allowed us to build a global audience and a global brand. If you can do it well, then you succeed, and the work comes. Having a marketplace of 8 billion people, compared to 26 million in Australia, opens the doors to opportunities that were once unimaginable unless you worked for a record label.
Where That Leaves Us Now
When I was working in a big-name studio, the reputation of the place did much of the marketing heavy lifting, and I benefitted from that as a junior engineer with no notable work to my name. There were a handful of occasions where my managers would try to convince A&R to assign me the mastering project instead of another established engineer, hoping to enhance my portfolio and finally secure a label job. Yet, when a hundred-dollar mastering fee feels like a financial and creative risk to a large company, they often just stick with the engineer they already know delivers. That’s fair enough.
So, I started growing my own business as a freelancer. I built a small Instagram presence, posted tiles of each release, and put together a Spotify playlist with tracks I’d mastered. It became, and still is, my active portfolio. I relied on artists tagging me to spread the word and it worked for a while. I still don’t have any major label work under my belt; I haven’t gone out of my way to connect with A&R or artist managers. I don’t get out much and network anymore anyway, COVID and traumatic music industry events have kept me quiet (but that’s a discussion for another time). But now, that kind of low-key, passive social media approach that I work with just doesn’t cut through. Instagram posts barely reach audiences, and short-form content is now the aim of the game.
More and more, it feels like to be seen, you have to become a form of influencer. Many engineers I know are creating video content, teaching techniques, breaking down their workflows on YouTube, posting reels, and doing gear reviews or other content. Yet, what started as “let your work speak” has turned into “you better speak on camera, and post often, if you want anyone to notice your work at all.” It’s not bad, exactly, and it’s not a new conversation had in the creative scene. It’s just not what I got into audio engineering for. I chose this path because I enjoy working independently and focusing on my craft without distractions. I’m introverted, so the idea of talking on camera and sharing pieces of my day-to-day feels uncomfortable.
So, I sit somewhere in between. I could post more content and try to grow my portfolio numbers, or I could keep relying on word-of-mouth, which tends to grow slowly unless a song takes off or wins an award. On the slow path, it includes waiting for awards and the luck of the draw. When you finally win that award, it’s not necessarily because the sound is better, it’s often the same quality, same gear and my same work, but because the stats got a boost, the track went viral, or a label got behind it, it gets the traction, and so new artists come for the same sound.
My current portfolio stats are okay. I’ve worked on hundreds of songs, mostly for indie and emerging artists, and I’ve been nominated for two awards. But I haven’t put time into growing the business, and perhaps it shows. I stepped back from leaning into business development as I’ve spent the last three years studying law, which I knew would take up most of my time and energy. It was a conscious decision and one I don’t regret.
Now, as I come to the end of my degree and start thinking about music again, it’s clear how much the landscape has changed. I’ve considered starting a TikTok or posting reels, but honestly, I don’t know what I’d post. I don’t really want to make educational content, some engineers already do that well, and I am happy to watch their content. “Day in the Life” videos don’t appeal to me either; it’s just me alone in a room working on music… not exactly gripping viewing. I’ve thought about podcasting since I already know how to handle the sound and video side of things, but the time and energy required to do it properly is no small thing.
I also see the uptake in email newsletters again, James Blake posted an incredibly insightful piece on Instagram about his reconnection with the audience and the changing landscape that artists face. He has spoken what we are all feeling.
That’s why I’m writing this long-form content instead. No face, no voice, no trending audio or trying to grab someone’s attention in the first two seconds. But still, I feel the pressure. I don’t want to spend hours creating content that might one day turn into a paid project. I worry that the focus on numbers—views, followers, reach—will end up mattering more than the actual quality of the sound. That the creative part will get chipped away by the need to be visible all the time.
It used to mainly be the musicians worrying about this change, how they had to become social media influencers, and how their follower counts dictated whether they were slotted on a festival. Worrying how listeners decided whether to hit play based on monthly Spotify listeners. Artists with 2 million are more likely to be given a shot than the ones with 23 monthly listeners. It’s starting to feel like the same rules apply to engineers too.
Maybe I’m being cynical, maybe I’ve missed the wave. But I can’t help feeling that if we all need to become influencers to get work, we’re losing something in the process…
Part two will be out next Friday.
