Getting an Agent

There is a wide spread belief among up and coming film and media composers that in order to be perceived as a professional you need to have an agent. Additionally, there is this misconception that when having an agent you get more and higher profile jobs.

Both of these assumptions are as a general statement not true.

It is still true that the film and media industry is incredibly hard to get a foot in the door but having an agent never changed much about this. Agents are not a holy grail to jump start your career but ideally can transform a substantial career into a more thriving career. In essence this means people have agents because they have a well going career and note people have a well going career because they have agents.

And even this dependence is not a "natural law". There are quite a few high up composers and artists who have no agents. Particularly outside of Hollywood it is not uncommon to not have an agent even though your career is running relatively well.

The strongest factor in the industry still are references. For an agent it is relevant to know what projects you have done already and how they can use your already existing career momentum to push it forward (and eventually make some personal gain from it). So there is no point in trying to get an agent without any substantial track record. In fact, the more common way would be for agents to approach you once they feel like there is some money to be made from your career.

There are some definitive up sides of getting an agent. Besides a potentially career pushing network you have someone who can play the bad cop in negotiations. Negotiating deals by yourself can sometimes mean to aggressively fight for certain contract clauses and depending on who you are negotiating with this tough business talk can influence the creative communication later on in the project. 

With bigger productions that usually is not really relevant as creative and production personell are usually separate people but in smaller productions you easily end up needing to talk business with a director and after that find a creative vision which depending on how tough the business talks were can cause some bad vibes. With someone else who takes over the business talk, this problem doesn't arise. But in such cases you hand of a considerable percentage of your income to your agent so everybody needs to decide on their own whether these pro arguments outweigh the cons.

So getting an agent is not the holy grail of the industry. I have seen quite a few colleagues who transitioned from self representing to getting an agent and in no instance has this lead to their career suddenly picking up considerably.

Personally, I have not had an agent in my career, partly also because my clients value a personal interaction with myself (which is also one arguments against agents) however I would not generally say that I want to keep it this way forever. It is not a high priority but if the time is right and I can see some clear benefit from it I would definitely consider it.