Sending Out Unsolicited Emails

Getting paid jobs in the field of media music is quite tricky, especially when you're just starting out and don't have a large portfolio. On the other hand allows the age of internet to research and contact all sorts of people or companies who could be potential clients.

So the idea to just contact them out of the blue and offer your services or send over demo material might be tempting.

From my own experience and from what I know from colleagues who tried the same thing, chances of success are really low but not nonexisting.

A few years ago, I spent quite some time gathering contact information from all sorts of companies and people that I thought could use my music for their projects. I sent out about 500 emails, all more or less with the same content, being sure that people were just waiting for a composer to show up in their inbox. There I was, gearing up and expecting a huge load of work after I invested so much time in researching all these contacts.

And then happened...

NOTHING. ZERO. NADA.

After a few days, I got some responses, all more or less saying "Thanks, but we have our composers in place." or "We'll take your contact into our database in case something comes up"

But the response rate was at best around 5% if not less.

By now I have a few friends wo work in such companies that I would have (or maybe actually have) sent one of such emails back then and I recently spoke with them about how they handle such things and most said that they get so many emails from people applying for all sorts of things that they simply cannot respond and most such emails remain unread or end up in the spam folder. 

I'm not saying to not try this path. I know of composers who with a lot of persistence are able to gather some projects through such bulk mailing. However don't put your hopes up and also don't invest large amounts of time into that as the work to success ratio is really low with this.

From my experience I can say that quality might beat quantity here. It might be better to properly research contacts who actually would need (or have used) music that fits your profile and then write a personalised message that references to their work and shows that this is not just another spam mail. Even better might be to try to call them by phone or see if you can introduce yourself personally if that is reasonable. But even then success rates are really low.

Of course everybody might have heard a story of a friend who knows somebody who has a colleague who heard of a composer who wrote an email to *insert huge studio/producer name* and got hired for the next big movie/game etc. And even if that might be true, it's probably as likely as winning in the lottery.

My advice here would be to rather invest energy to take care for the contacts that you have already, attend all sorts of events that might get you into personal contact with people who look for music and try your luck there. Sending out bulk emails is a quite easy way but also very unlikely to work.