Most composers I talk to make the same mistake when they try to get work. They send a few emails, get no response, and conclude the market is saturated. But the problem was never the market. It was the approach.
Getting into the music industry, whether that is video games, trailers, or media agencies, follows a clear process. Not a mysterious one. Not one that requires connections you do not have. You can start today, and I will walk you through exactly how.
Build your brand first
If you are a composer, you have to think like an entrepreneur. There is no way around it. If you want to sit there and write music without dealing with the business side, keep it as a hobby. That is completely fine. But if you want to make a living from this, you need to take it seriously.
That starts with the basics. Use your real name. Get a proper email domain. alexpfeffer.com, not alexpfeffer347@gmail.com. Your email address is the first thing someone sees when you reach out. A custom domain says you are willing to invest in yourself. A Gmail address says nothing about you at all.
Think of it like attending an industry event. You would not show up in pajamas. Your email, your logo, your website, that is your outfit in the digital world.
And speaking of logos: hire someone. Do not design it yourself unless you are actually a designer. A good logo needs to work on light backgrounds, dark backgrounds, at tiny sizes and large sizes. It needs to look clean and proportional. Go on Fiverr, find someone decent, spend the money. While you are at it, pick two or three brand colors and a consistent set of fonts. Headlines and body text. Done.
Do not overcomplicate this part. Custom email domain, professional logo, consistent visual identity. You can get all of that sorted in a weekend.
Know your target group
This is the mistake I see eight or nine out of ten composers make. They never decide who they are actually trying to reach.
If you want to work in the video game industry, your demo reel should contain only video game music. Not film scores. Not advertising spots. Not chill piano music. If you send a children's music demo to a fantasy RPG studio, what do you think happens? Nothing. It goes straight to the trash.
You need to speak directly to the people you want to work with. If your website is all about you, your biography, when you started playing piano, how your parents cried at your first recital, nobody at a game studio cares. Companies care about one thing: can your music make their product better? Can you help them sell more copies?
I am not saying hide your passion. I am saying frame your work in a way that makes sense to the person reading it. Focus on the benefits you bring to them, not on your own story.
Pick one target group first. Video game companies. Trailer music publishers. Media agencies. Get traction there before you try to expand. Spreading yourself thin across five different industries at once is a guaranteed way to get zero responses.
Do your company research
Once you know who you are targeting, you need to actually find them. Go on LinkedIn. Search for audio directors in the video game industry. Filter by country or even by city.
You can use Steam or other platforms to find game studios. There are lead generation tools like Apollo, ListKit, or LinkedIn Sales Navigator. These cost money, anywhere from 50 to 200 dollars a month, but they speed up the research by a factor of ten.
Most composers skip this step entirely and just blast out emails to whoever they can find. That is basically spam, and it does not work.
Outreach and networking
Now for the part everyone dreads. Outreach.
You want your messages to be short, specific, and focused on what you can do for them. Do not write "Hey, I am a composer, I charge 300 per minute." That tells the recipient nothing about why they should care.
If you are targeting video game companies, your messages need to feel relevant to their world. Show that you understand what they are working on. Mention a specific project or game they have released. Generic messages get deleted.
A few things most people get wrong about outreach in general.
Following up. Most composers send 10 emails and give up when nobody replies. That is not how this works. Send a follow up seven days later. You know from your own inbox that you ignore emails all the time, but when someone follows up, you actually look at it. I have seen it over and over: most conversions happen on the second or third email, not the first one.
Calling. Open Google Maps, find video game companies in your area, and call them. I know it sounds old school. But in a world where everyone hides behind automated emails, a real human voice on the phone gets attention. Most of your competitors will never do this, which is exactly why it works.
Going to events. Meet people in person. Shake hands. Have a coffee. This builds relationships that no email can replicate.
Thinking long term. You are not trying to close a deal on the first contact. You are planting seeds. If you contact five people on LinkedIn every day for a year, that is roughly 1,500 new connections in your industry. Something will come of that. The numbers are on your side.
When was the last time you did this consistently though? You have no problem drinking your coffee every morning or taking a shower. Why not make contacting three to five people part of that same daily routine?
Build a demo reel that works
Your demo reel is your sales tool. Let me break down what it actually needs.
A professional logo and an appealing header image that speaks to your target group. If you are going after fantasy game studios, show something that feels like a fantasy world. When someone lands on your page, they should feel at home within two seconds.
A short bio. Not a novel. A few sentences about what you do and who you serve.
Three to five tracks, maximum. Your music needs to tell a story and fit the target group. For video games, that means a main theme, two or three in game tracks that loop well, a win jingle, a lose jingle, maybe a battle track. These are the things game studios actually need day to day.
A clear call to action. Booking calendar, contact form, email address, phone number. Make it dead simple for someone to reach you.
Nobody cares about your plugin list. Nobody cares which sample libraries you use. Nobody wants to hear your string legato demos. They care about what you can deliver for their project.
I recommend using Reelcrafter for your audio player. On their professional plan, you get detailed analytics showing exactly when people listened to your tracks, which ones they played, where they dropped off. That kind of data lets you optimize your reel over time instead of guessing what works.
Create social media content without overthinking it
Most composers overthink content creation to the point where they never post anything. I see it constantly. People spend weeks planning a "content strategy" and then publish nothing.
Grab your phone. Put it on a tripod behind you while you work. Put your track in the background. Add a text caption asking what people think. Post it. That took five minutes and it is a real piece of content.
You can film yourself walking your dog with a track playing in the background. You can do a 30 second clip talking about something you learned while composing. The newest smartphone cameras shoot 4K video. The quality is more than good enough.
Trend hopping works too. When a big game drops, like Baldur's Gate or the next Elder Scrolls, create your own version of what the main theme would sound like if you had written it. Tag the game. People discover your music this way. Audio directors at these studios are humans. They scroll through short videos on their phones like everyone else.
Consistency matters more than quality here. Post every day if you can. It does not need to be perfect. I have students who went from 50 followers to 3,000 or 4,000 by posting consistently for a few months. Nothing fancy, no expensive gear, no professional editing. They just showed up every day.
Always analyze and optimize
Everything I described above is a loop, not a one time setup. If nobody is clicking your demo reel, look at the data. Maybe the intro to your main theme is a 30 second string drone that nobody wants to sit through. Maybe your email subject lines are boring.
Use A/B testing where you can. YouTube lets you test different titles. Email software lets you split test subject lines. Try option A on half your audience, option B on the other half, see which one performs better. Patterns emerge faster than you think.
This applies to everything. Your outreach emails, your demo reel, your social media. The people who make it in this industry are not the ones who got lucky once. They are the ones who kept tweaking things until something clicked.
Stop making excuses and start
The market is not saturated. Your strategy was not right. And you can change that today.
Get your brand basics in order. Pick a target group. Research companies. Reach out to them. Build a demo reel that actually serves your audience. Post content. Look at the numbers and do more of what works.
If you want help with this, I work with composers directly through my programs. You can join the free Audio Artist Academy, go deeper with Audio Artist Rise, or hand the entire growth side to me through my done for you service. Whatever makes sense for where you are right now.
