Building A Freelance Audio Career — My Interview with Sam Inglis

Sam Inglis has edited Sound On Sound for years, and he asked the questions a freelancer actually loses sleep over: when is it safe to go out on your own, should you specialise, what is a manager really for, and how do you price without either scaring people off or quietly going broke. This is the most practical conversation I've had on a podcast.

Key Moments

"Put chaos in the creativity side of it. Don't put it in the business operations side. Don't make what you offer chaotic, or how much you price, or who you're positioning to. Make all of that super stable, so that when a project comes in, what can be chaotic and free is what you try."

"I'm teaching people to create the shape of a business that a manager would be able to amplify. A manager should be an enhancement. They shouldn't be you."

"Word of mouth is really a demonstration of momentum people have built over time. If you're just starting out, or in the middle of your career, you might not have the momentum you think you have."

"Your processes and how you conduct yourself are just as important as the mix that you deliver."

The Gap Nobody Mentors You Through

Mentorship is normal in audio, and it's genuinely valuable — but it almost always means craft. Someone shows you their chain, their approach, how they'd treat a vocal. Nobody sits you down and explains how to price, how to organise the business itself rather than the session folder, or what to do when someone says no.

I noticed this because I came at it sideways. I spent years in product development doing customer research, and I'd been a freelance designer since I was about thirteen. My parents were briefly convinced I was dealing drugs, because people would knock, hand me money, and leave — the actual work had all happened on the computer. So I learned early what it does to your head to put a number on something you thought was pure creativity, and to let other people decide whether they like it.

When I moved to LA about ten years ago, my friend Jon Castelli introduced me to his whole network, and I watched genuinely successful engineers struggle with things I'd figured out at fifteen. That's what I wanted to fix. I started by doing brand work for them — good logos, good websites — and it kept going nowhere, because there was no business underneath it to carry the work. So I added the next piece, and the next.

There's also a ceiling on the craft answer. Getting better at mixing matters enormously, right up until it doesn't move anything material in your business. I grew up recording with a microphone taped into a headphone jack with a sock around it, and some of those recordings still sound cool to me. Past a certain point, another plugin chain is not the constraint.

When Is It Actually Time To Go Freelance?

The honest answer is that there's rarely a bad time — you're mostly deciding how hard you want the next few years to be. But there's a real checklist, and it maps onto the nine stages I work through with people:

• Can you look at the different parts of a business and diagnose what's actually going on?
• Do you have a defined offer, and is it priced?
• Do you have enough pricing data to know the range people actually pay?
• Do you know who you're working for, and why?
• Do you have proof you can do it well?
• Are you genuinely okay being seen by other people?
• Do you run a client experience people want to come back to?
• Are you good at building relationships, and do you get repeat work?

All yes is a great sign. Some yes is also a good sign. "Kind of" to all of them is still fine — you can learn most of this as you go, and plenty of my work is with people who leapt first and are now filling in the gaps. The one combination to worry about is no to everything and you can't mix yet.

The harder items aren't on that list, though. If you're impatient, if you expect outcomes immediately, if you bring your ego into every room — those are the ones you can't spot in yourself, and hints from other people usually don't land. Business will teach you how you conduct yourself in the world. If a pattern is already defeating you in your friendships, it gets magnified the moment there's a dollar amount attached.

Specialise — But Put The Chaos Somewhere Useful

I do recommend narrowing. Not immediately, though: sometimes you don't know yourself well enough yet to know what you actually lean toward, and cutting everything off early sets you up for a grass-is-greener ache five years in.

What I see far more often is the opposite problem, and it usually isn't a strategy at all. I had a client tell me he wanted to do tracking and mixing. I asked why those two — was it money, was it fear of saying no, or was it something else? He said, honestly, he just wanted a bit of chaos so he wasn't doing one thing.

That's a real need and it deserves a real home. But the home isn't your operations. Put the chaos in the creative work. Keep what you offer, what you charge, who you're for, and how you do outreach boring and stable. Because if everything is chaotic by the time a song arrives, you can't receive it properly — you're processing the artist's chaos through your own, and the work can't be about them.

The other thing worth saying out loud: doing a bunch of things is fine if you're consciously experimenting. Tell me why you're doing it and when you'll wrap the experiment up. If you can't, it isn't an experiment.

What A Manager Is Actually For

Some people hear all this and think: sure, but isn't this what a manager does? So am I teaching people to be their own manager?

Not quite. I'm teaching people to build the shape of a business that a manager could amplify — something to actually manage. The complaint I hear on nearly every call with someone who has a manager is that the manager isn't setting their prices, isn't bringing clients, isn't telling them who to work with. And when I go through everything, there's often nothing there to manage.

Think about it from the other side. If they decided your positioning, your pricing, your clients and your direction, they'd have built your business — and 10 or 20% would be a bad deal for them, not for you. A manager should be an enhancement, not a replacement for you.

There's a lot of magical thinking here. I think people hiring managers are often looking for two things they'd never say out loud: permission to be seen, and a savior. Once I get them, my career begins. Once I get them, the work never stops coming. We'd all love that to be true. Meanwhile the people I've worked with who then got a manager report the opposite dynamic — the manager is delighted, because now there's a lane to research, contacts to ping, work to turn down, and terms to negotiate.

Networking, Visibility, And Why Word Of Mouth Is A Trap

I split networking into two things that get confused constantly: peer development and customer development.

Peers matter. I run a WhatsApp group out here, the LA Mixbuds — plugins, releases, who said what on a reel, mix feedback. Almost none of them are people I've worked with, and that's the point. A functioning peer group keeps you grounded in an isolating business. Recently I put a batch of people I'd spoken to in Toronto into a group and told them to go meet each other.

But people over-index on it. If all your friends are mix engineers, everything you discuss is mix engineering, and eventually everything you complain about is mix engineering. Worse, the isolation leaks into the client side — you start looking for friends among your clients, and then you're discounting for everyone because you're on a hunt for friendship.

On visibility, the trap is different. People assume word of mouth is the goal, and that the big engineers all work that way. Word of mouth is really just a demonstration of momentum accumulated over years. If you're early or mid-career, you don't have the version where a label knows your number by heart. Nobody wakes up and randomly picks you over the person whose face they see all the time.

Which is where social media comes in, and where I watch people go wrong most expensively. I know content creators — big ones — who can't convert any of it, because the audience consuming their content isn't the audience that buys their service. That's an accident, and it costs years. You don't need to be an influencer. You need enough that someone can scan your page and understand what you do, see the proof, and read your taste and your philosophy. Then get to a real conversation: DMs into a video call, or coffee if you can. And know that the surface matters more than the platform — Instagram DMs are a completely different universe from stories, posts, or reels.

Pricing Is An Experiment, Not A Number

Every price I've ever set has changed. Pricing is an experiment you run, and it's dynamic for two reasons.

First: what do you actually need to survive? Not what car you saw another engineer driving. If twenty songs a month is your realistic ceiling before burnout, and they're priced at $100, does that produce a life? If not, the number isn't the only thing that needs to change. But if you genuinely need one song a month, that's a completely different set of strategies available to you.

Second: the number isn't the whole price. $400 paid over four months is $100 a month. Ten calls bought together may have a different effective rate than one. How you structure tiers, incentives and terms is as much a part of pricing as the figure itself — and a tier structure means a "no" doesn't collapse into either losing the job or panic-discounting for no stated reason.

On free: free is fine, but free should be a tier you offer at $0, with its value stated, not a symptom of not knowing how to price. If you don't know how to price and you're giving it away, pick a number and learn what people say. And learn how to get paid as early as you learn what to charge — how the invoice goes out, what's included, how the money actually arrives. That's the part people postpone and regret.

Sam made the point that the projects that went worst in his career were the free and near-free ones, and that matches everything I see. When someone opens by haggling me down, I've already diagnosed them — it tells me what they believe a service provider is worth, and I can only imagine the state of their own business.

What Else We Got Into

• How career paths have changed now that tape op → assistant → resident → freelance barely exists
• The archetype I see most: five to seven years in, maybe an internship behind them, late thirties, going out on their own
• Why I'd rather work in an open space than compete head-to-head with thousands of people
• Why I don't try to compete with the great craft educators, and what I'd rather bring instead
• What I mean when I say I look at this industry as a researcher and a sociologist first
• The Nathan Dantzler story: how a calendar invite sent from a party turned into being hired, and why he says that was the actual reason

Watch If...

• You're weighing up going freelance and want a real checklist instead of a feeling
• You've been told to specialise and it makes you uneasy
• You're waiting on a manager to make your career happen
• You're posting constantly and none of it turns into work
• You price by guessing, or by whatever the last person paid
• You keep discounting for friends and can't work out why the year didn't add up

Sam asked sharper questions than I expected on the money side, and didn't let the vague answers pass. If you don't already follow the Sound On Sound People & Music Industry podcast, it's worth the subscribe.