Unpleasant Work Keeps Coming Back

One of the painful truths in the media composer world that I needed to learn over the years is that once you accept a job that you don't enjoy and only do for the money, chances that you will get asked again for a similar job later on again are relatively high. 

This business works very much on word of mouth and follow-up projects. I'm not sure whether this is true for every composer, but at least for me, I tend to be able to track back quite clearly where my projects are coming from. In fact some of the jobs that I do today, I can still track back to the very first bigger project that I did almost 20 years ago.

Consequentially, this means, if at one point in your career you take a turn into a direction that you don't enjoy with the reasoning of "It pays ok, I need the money and it's only this one job", there are chances that this job will haunt you for years unless you consciously stop it.

At the beginning of my career I once got hired to write the music for a small computer game. The brief was to create more or less "synth elevator music background loops". At that time, I needed this job and needed the money even though it didn't pay well so I accepted, already knowing that I would not enjoy this at all as this is simply not my cup of tea. I finished this job reasonably well and reasonably frustrated and just a few months later I got an email by another developer with a similar game who needed similar music who heard my work on the other game and got my contact from the first developer. He asked me whether I would write some music for his game. I sighed and accepted. And this "line of work" continued for almost a year before I actively decided to not accept any more work in this particular field.

The whole media world is very prone to typecasting and we can see it even with the biggest names. For instance Howard Shore used to be "the thriller score guy" before he got past that with Lord of the Rings. 

So the sum of these two factors can very quickly lead to your career drifting off into a direction that you don't feel comfortable with.

So it actually took me a few years to figure this out and actively take control over these issues. Whenever I could afford it to reject a job that would not fit into my profile and where I could anticipate that it would lead into the wrong direction, I did reject it even if it meant in some cases losing a considerable amount of money.

Just a few days ago, I got asked whether I wanted to take on a job of note engraving and copying for a publisher. And while I absolutely admire and respect the work that is being put into well engraved scores, I really don't take any particular joy from such work. As it was a small publisher, I immediately knew that if I accepted that job, I would automatically land in their "contact list to call for future jobs" and in the forseeable future I would be working on projects after projects that I do not enjoy. So I rejected that job even before getting to the payment part of the negotiations.

So the bottom line here is that as soon as you can afford it, reject jobs that you don't enjoy or they will keep coming back. This is often not a matter of "I can accept them for a while and stop anytime" as at one point they willl start to shape your work profile and professional reception in a way where this line of works starts to become linked to your name and then it is considerably trickier to steer back into another direction.

So take matters in your own hand and consicously shape your career, especially when you are stuck with jobs that you don't enjoy.