The Danger of Depending on Just a Few Clients

In my early years of pursuing a career as a media composer I had to learn one lesson the hard way which was to never make yourself depending on just a few clients.

While I was still in Uni studying I was lucky enough to being hired for scoring a relatively big feature film which allowed me to also have my first recording with a professional orchestra. Following this, I was contacted by a film composer to orchestrate and later co-compose for his projects.

We were mainly working for one director who had a surprise success with one of his movies and consequently got hired for several rather big follow up productions. These were happening in quite rapid succession so for a few years we were almost exclusively writing scores for this one director. However, the problem was that none of his movies ever reached the success of his first "big hit" but quite the contrary - they were doing really badly at the box office so what happened was that after these few years of directing one movie after the other and being loyal in always hiring us to write the score he suddenly didn't get any more directing jobs. And consequentially we didn't get any more scoring gigs. 

There was another additional problem which was that due to all the movies we scored being commercial disasters and not making the round in the industry, barely anybody heard our scores and the diversification that you could expect after writing a score just didn't happen. There were barely any "Hey, I heard your score in movie X, and I liked it, I'm doing a movie, want to work for me?" effects with these projects.

So suddenly we were out of work. And while things were running well with scoring movie after movie before that, earning enough money etc. I didn't think of diversifying my clients. I was busy, I had fun, I earned money, and I was young and inexperienced, so I didn't see the end of this coming.

And the end hit really hard. I had a very modest life style during these years so I didn't need much money to get by but even with this modest life style, the absence of substantial work caused me to get into a quite existential financial situation as I also had no passive income at this time. So I needed too pick up teaching to generate some expectable income and to get by.

The lack of diversification with my clients required me to basically build up my career once again almost from the ground up. Of course my experience with real ensembles helped to pick up some orchestration jobs but they barely made enough money to sustain me. As I also a few years earlier decided to focus my main work on projects with real players (and didn't invest into any sample production infrastructure at this time - because with that one director we always had live players anyway) I was barely getting by.

So I learned the hard way that no matter how good things go with one or a few clients, the industry is way too unpredictable to take this for granted. After this experience I put a lot of effort into diversifying my clients to a point where when one or even a few dropping out I could easily compensate through the others.

So the bottom line here should be that relying on just a handful of clients is incredibly dangerous and even if things are going well you should keep networking as much as possible to potentially be able to compensate if these projects don't continue to flow. The industry is way too unpredictable and hire and fire happens everywhere so in order to sustain a career in this field, it is essential to have clients from different branches who ideally are completely independent from each other.