The Job That Disappeared (And What It Taught Me About Being Freelance)

When I first started out trying to break into music production and composing for TV, basically taking any audio job I could get my hands on, the thing that actually paid the bills and got me moving was music editing.

I had a really good run with it. Two series of Phoenix Rise on the BBC, and off the back of that, a steady stream of smaller jobs for a year or two. It was the thing that took me from "trying to do this" to "doing this full time." Looking back, it was probably the single most important stepping stone in my early career.

Here's the strange part: that job barely exists anymore.

Where did it go?

Music editing as its own distinct role seems to have quietly dissolved. Budgets have tightened across the board, and instead of bringing in a dedicated music editor, productions now seem to spread that work across a few different people: the picture editor will often do a pass on it themselves, or the music supervision team picks up the slack. Sometimes it's a composer doing double duty. I'm not even sure there's a consistent answer anymore; it just seems to get absorbed into whoever's already in the room.

It's not that the need for the work went away. Someone still has to make sure the music cuts properly, sits right against picture, doesn't clash with dialogue. It's that the dedicated role for doing it went away. The task survived. The job title didn't.

Which raises a bigger question

If a job can just... stop existing, what does that mean for being freelance in audio generally? Can you actually build a career around one specific lane (mixing, music editing, sound design, whatever it is) and just get really good at that one thing? Or does the nature of freelance work in this industry mean you have to be a jack of all trades, ready to pivot the second the market shifts under you?

I don't think there's a clean answer, but my own path has basically been the second option, whether I planned it that way or not. Music editing got me in the door, and then I just kept adding things as the work demanded it: sound design, bespoke composition, post-production, producing artist tracks, and a fairly long tail of other bits and pieces along the way. None of it was really a grand strategy. It was more that every time a door closed, I noticed another one cracked open nearby, and I went and stood in it.

The trade-off nobody really talks about

There's an obvious upside to spreading yourself across skills: you're harder to make redundant, because no single shift in industry practice can wipe out everything you do at once. If music editing disappears, fine, you've still got composition and sound design to lean on.

But there's a real cost too. Specialists tend to command more respect, charge more, and get recommended for the specific thing they're brilliant at. When you're the person who does five things reasonably well rather than one thing brilliantly, it can be harder to get pigeonholed in a good way, the way that makes someone think of you first for a particular kind of job. You become a safe pair of hands rather than the obvious name.

I think the honest answer, at least for where the industry is right now, is that pure specialism is a much riskier bet than it used to be. Budgets keep getting squeezed, roles keep getting folded into each other, and the freelancers who seem to be doing best are the ones who can flex across a handful of related skills rather than the ones who've planted a flag in just one. That doesn't mean you shouldn't have a thing you're known for (I'd still say composition and sound design are closer to my "home" than the rest), but it does mean treating that one thing as your whole identity is probably a bit naive these days.

Maybe in five years something else will have quietly vanished too. At this point I'd almost expect it.