Nobody Says It Out Loud

The ask is almost never a request

I’m thirty-eight, with credits people recognise, and I still get asked for free work. That surprises people when I say it, which tells you how badly the outside understanding of this industry matches the inside one.

But here is the part that matters, and it’s the reason most advice about this is useless: the difficult requests are almost never absurd, and they’re rarely even stated.

Nobody sends an email saying give me this for nothing. What happens is subtler. You’re working with someone. The project is fun. You’re writing a song together, or producing something exciting, and there’s genuine warmth in the room — and inside that warmth an expectation forms that something else is included. Promotion. A lower rate. A favour. Something extra that was never discussed and never priced.

And sometimes that’s beautiful. When it happens organically — when two people are genuinely doing something for each other — that’s one of the best parts of this work. I’ve given plenty away that way and never regretted it.

But when it arrives as a kind of bait and switch — when the closeness was the setup and the ask was the point — it doesn’t feel right. And you usually can’t say so, because nothing was ever actually said.

The real problem: our industry runs on indirectness

I’ve come to think this is the root of it.

The music industry has a serious problem with indirectness. Nothing gets named. Arrangements stay vague. Expectations get implied and never confirmed. And a lot of people operate with what feels, honestly, like a snake-oil approach — where the vagueness isn’t an accident but the technique.

That indirectness is why so many creatives struggle with business, negotiation, sales, and marketing. We come up inside a culture that never models directness, so we learn that asking plainly is rude, that naming a rate is aggressive, that clarifying scope is a sign you don’t trust someone. Then we get an icky feeling about the whole business side — and the icky feeling is accurate, it’s just misdirected. What’s icky isn’t business. It’s the indirectness we’ve been trained to accept as normal.

So here’s my position, and everything else in this essay follows from it: we have to value ourselves, and be direct and upfront about arrangements. Just because we’re doing something fun together does not mean boundaries are out the window. It doesn’t mean moderation is out the window. It doesn’t even mean professional boundaries around how we interact are out the window.

The work being enjoyable is not a reason to stop being professional. It’s usually the reason people forget to be.

Where it actually shows up

I don’t want to give you dramatic examples, because I don’t really have any. What I have is the ordinary kind, which is worse because it’s constant:

• I’m mixing for an independent artist, and they’re assuming mastering is included. It isn’t. If I don’t say so early, I’m going to be delivering something I never agreed to, or having an awkward conversation late.
• I’m hired as a session musician and someone expects writing — real compositional contribution — with no discussion of compensation or credit.
• I’m producing, and additional editing or extra recording days appear that aren’t down to me at all. They’re down to the artist’s readiness, or a client who is very particular. Either is fine. But whose hours those are needs to be established before they happen.

None of these people are villains. That’s the point. These are ordinary situations that turn into double binds — you want to make the client happy, protect the relationship, respect the person — and the harder version isn’t a stranger asking for a favour. It’s a client you’ve worked with for a long time. Or one paying you well. That’s precisely when you feel you should bow to the request, and precisely when you shouldn’t.

What I did at twenty-five, and the friendship it cost

At twenty-five I was a yes man. Sure, sure, sure.

I had a client who was also a close friend. Not a casual friend — we spent holidays together, went on double dates with our girlfriends, were heading toward the kind of friendship you keep for life. I was mixing for him.

And I gave him rates I came to resent. I went far over scope, repeatedly. He thought that snacks, meals, and letting me stay at his place were an adequate form of thank you — the way friends do favours for each other. Meanwhile I was putting in enormous hours, feeling badly underpaid, and getting angrier at myself with every session.

Eventually I told him I hated working with him. That I loved him as a friend and hated him as a client.

It destroyed the friendship.

Here’s what I want you to hear about that, because the version I told myself at the time was completely wrong. At twenty-five, my mentality was: he’s the problem. These kinds of clients suck. That’s genuinely what I thought.

At thirty-eight I see it plainly. It was my responsibility. Every part of it. I never set the rate properly. I never defined the scope. I never corrected the drift when it started. I let resentment build in silence for months and then delivered it all at once to someone who had no idea it was coming — because I had never told him.

He wasn’t taking advantage of me. I never told him what the arrangement was, so he invented one, and his invention was snacks.

That’s the most expensive lesson I’ve had in this business, and it didn’t cost me money. It cost me a friend.

Prevention beats everything

Past thirty, my responses got much healthier — but the real change wasn’t in how I respond. It was in preventing the situation from forming at all.

Four things do that, and I’d give them to anyone at any stage:

1. Get clear on your value. Not what you hope you’re worth. What you actually provide, stated in a way you can say out loud without flinching.

2. Research the market properly. Where do you genuinely stand? Where is the supply and where is the demand? This isn’t ego work, it’s positioning — and you cannot price without it.

3. Understand which client actually values what you provide. This one changed the most for me. The right client isn’t the one with the most money — it’s the one who values the specific thing you do, because that’s what determines both what they’ll pay and what they’ll expect.

4. Be organised and structured about rates. Have a rate sheet. Have packages. Decide the numbers — up and down, in tiers if that suits you — before someone asks. Treat yourself like an actual business.

That last one is the whole essay compressed. The reason vague requests work on us is that we’re vague ourselves. Someone can only assume mastering is included if I haven’t said what’s included.

When yes is self-sabotage

Here’s the way I think about it now, and it’s the frame that ended the problem for me.

Say I know that a certain rate is part of what allows me to provide for a family of six. And then I go and take actions, make decisions, and communicate in ways that trap me in a position where I can only provide for a family of one or two.

That isn’t a client getting in the way of my dreams. That’s me getting in the way of my dreams.

We self-sabotage out of fear that people will leave us. Out of fear that we’re not good enough, or haven’t proven ourselves yet. Out of assumptions we never test — nobody pays that, nobody respects that, that’s not how it works here.

And if we don’t keep our big why in front of us the whole way, it all falls apart quietly, over years, in decisions that each seemed reasonable at the time.

When free is the right call

It has been, plenty of times — and it’s almost never about the money.

The clearest case is when I can tell the experience is going to be draining. Not just difficult. Draining. Wrong fit at a level that no rate fixes. Past about twenty-eight I realised that no amount of money is worth being in that situation — for either person.

So I’d rather say it early. Admit the misalignment as fast as possible, cut the losses as fast as possible, and let someone better suited serve that client. That protects both of you from a horrible experience, and it’s the version of “free” I actually believe in: not free work, but a free exit.

And I want to be fair — genuinely horrible experiences have been very few and far between for me. But the principle holds regardless: health comes first, because if health goes, everything else goes with it. We do this because we love it. Why would we put ourselves in a position that works against the love?

To the young producers saying yes to everything

I see a lot of green producers — late teens, early twenties — saying yes to so much that I look at it and think: there’s very little self-respect in that.

I know the industry line. Pay your dues. Show how hungry you are. To an extent that’s acceptable, and to another extent I flatly disagree with it. Look at internships in other sectors: plenty of entry-level people are respected, work healthy hours, and rise without sacrificing their sanity or their boundaries.

There’s a reason entertainment has the reputation it has around boundaries. It’s not only Hollywood — it happens across many industries — but there’s a reason the association exists. Executives who believe they can take advantage of people are able to do so precisely because young people have been taught that objecting is unprofessional.

Some of you will learn this through hard knocks; I did. But if you can see it happen to someone older first, you can skip a few of the misfortunes — and you can start succeeding in more areas of your life sooner.

Because here’s what I’ve watched happen. People move to Los Angeles. I’m an actor. I’m a singer. I’m a producer. And you ask: what’s your website? What have you done? What are you working on right now? And it’s — well, rent is expensive, cost of living is high, I’ve been grinding at Starbucks. No website. Nothing to show.

Ten years later, twenty years later, still at the Starbucks. Still saying it.

And a great deal of that stagnation is the self-sabotage I’ve been describing — not lack of talent, not lack of opportunity. A decade of small decisions made from fear, each one reasonable, adding up to a career that never started.

The skills nobody told me were part of the job

I had to develop communication skills deliberately. Pay for courses. Go to seminars. Rehearse. Role-play conversations. And what I was learning was business communication, negotiation, sales conversations, client fulfilment, account management.

All of that is part of being a musician, a singer, a producer, an engineer, a lyricist, a session singer. Nobody tells you that. It isn’t taught anywhere near where we learn our craft. And being able to hear a situation clearly and respond well is invaluable — it’s the difference between the double bind and a solved conversation.

I have phrases now. Real ones, developed over years:

• “Unfortunately I’m not able to do that — but what I can do is this.”
• “That doesn’t quite work for me. What could really work for us is…”
• And my favourite, which I use constantly: “Would you consider…?”

That last one is worth more than it looks. That sounds like an interesting idea — I’m not sure about it, but would you consider… It keeps the room open. It moves the conversation somewhere workable instead of ending it. It lets someone save face while you hold your line.

I learned it in a business communication course, which is exactly my point. You have to learn negotiation and sales communication to thrive in any part of this industry. Not because the industry is hostile — because it’s indirect, and directness is a skill nobody hands you.

What it comes down to

Everything I got wrong at twenty-five, I got wrong by being unclear and calling it being nice.

The rates I resented, I set. The scope that ran over, I allowed. The friendship I lost, I lost by staying silent for months and then saying the loudest possible version of what I should have said quietly in the first week.

Being direct is not the opposite of being generous. It’s the thing that makes generosity possible, because you can only give freely from a position you actually chose.

Set the rate. Name the scope. Say what’s included. And when someone assumes something you never offered, correct it early, kindly, and out loud.

Nobody says it out loud. Be the one who does.

— D.C.

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