Nobody teaches composers how to get work.
They teach you harmony. Orchestration. How to make your strings sound cinematic enough for a trailer house. Then you finish your course and the industry shrugs and says good luck, hope someone finds you.
The unspoken strategy is post on social media, submit to libraries, and wait. Maybe network at a conference once a year if you can afford the ticket. Maybe cold email a supervisor with a generic "here is my reel" message that goes straight to trash.
That is not a career strategy. That is hope.
I spent 20 years doing exactly this. Some years it worked. Some years it was silence. And I never questioned the approach because I assumed that is just how the industry works.
The embarrassing realization
Then I got into the automation world and noticed something I wish I had seen sooner.
Every other industry has outreach systems. Personalized, researched, scalable. A sales rep at a SaaS company sends 50 targeted emails a day without breaking a sweat. Every one references the recipient's company, their role, the thing they just shipped. That is normal. That is baseline.
Meanwhile composers send "Hi, I am a composer, here is my reel" to a generic info@ address and wonder why nobody replies.
We are decades behind. And nobody inside the music education world is going to fix it, because most of them do not know it is a problem.
What people think I do vs. what I actually do
When I tell people I work with AI now, I am pretty sure most of them imagine me sitting around making weird cat pictures and random ambient tracks.
The actual work looks more like this:
- Automated cold outreach systems that get 5%+ reply rates
- Custom CRM and productivity apps driven by agents
- Local cron jobs that clean my desktop and do YouTube research while I sleep
- Systems that chop long-form videos into shorts and drop them into a scheduling CSV
Less "magic art generator," more "boring plumbing that saves hundreds of hours and brings in real revenue." None of it is flashy. All of it compounds.
I say this because the outreach system I am about to describe is not a cool toy. It is the same kind of infrastructure sales teams have been running for a decade. It just never made it over to our side of the industry.
The manual way is weak. The ChatGPT way is also weak.
Most outreach emails in the creative industry are bad. It does not matter whether you wrote it yourself or had ChatGPT do it.
The manual version goes like this. You find a company. You spend 20 minutes digging through their website. You open Gmail, stare at an empty draft, write "Hi, I am a composer and I would love to work with you. Here is my reel." You read it back. You know it is weak. You send it anyway because you do not know what else to write.
The AI version is not much better. You open ChatGPT. You type "write a cold email to a game studio." You get back "I hope this message finds you well" and four LinkedIn-flavored paragraphs that sound like every other cold email in the same inbox. You send it thinking at least it sounds professional. It is not. It sounds like a bot talking to a bot.
Both versions have the same problem. They are missing everything that makes a real person stop and respond.
The structure is the strategy
There are specific things that belong in an outreach email. Things that make the person on the other end pause and think okay, this one is different. Most creatives have never been taught what those things are. Not in school. Not in masterclasses. Not in the YouTube tutorials about "how to get clients."
This is the part that took me two decades to figure out: it is not about writing better sentences. It is about knowing what to include, in what order, and why each piece is there. The structure of the email is the strategy. Get that wrong and it does not matter how clever your prose is.
Nobody is going to hand you that structure for free in a blog post, and I am not going to pretend otherwise. But once you have it, the next question becomes how do you actually execute it at volume without turning yourself into a research robot for six hours a day.
What the agentic version actually does
Once I had the structure, I built a system around it. Not a prompt. A full workflow.
Here is the difference in practice.
Manual: open a company website. Dig around for a contact. Find an info@ address. Copy paste a generic email. Repeat three times. Call it a productive morning.
Agentic: 100 companies researched automatically. Key contacts identified. Recent projects pulled in. The system notices that contact A worked with contact B on a title you were part of, and quietly uses that in the email. Every message references real context. The game they just shipped. The trailer they cut. The show that came out last week. Everything lands as a draft in your Gmail. You review, tweak, send.
Same amount of your time. Completely different outcomes.
The emails this thing writes are ones I would send with my own name on them. That was the bar. If I would not send it, the system should not send it either.
And because it runs on your own laptop, you own it. No monthly fees to a platform holding your contacts hostage. No vendor suddenly tripling prices once you depend on them.
What this actually means for you
You do not need to become a growth engineer. You do not need to learn Python or set up servers.
But you do need to accept two things. The way you were taught to look for work is broken. And the people getting consistent responses are doing something different.
You can do this manually if you have the discipline. Pick one target market. Research every company before you write a word. Follow up twice. Reference something real about their work. Keep at it for a year and you will see results that nobody else in your cohort is seeing.
Or you can let an agent do the research and hand you drafts to review.
I have been setting these systems up for creatives who are done waiting to be discovered. If you want to see what it looks like for your specific target market, send me a message.
