#021 Russ Hughes: He's keeping score and we should be paid more

In this episode, Neil and Jason talk to Russ Hughes, who founded the Production Expert blog nearly 20 years ago. Now it attracts over 7 million viewers a year: and all of them drawn to the Expert website by the blog's justifiable reputation for trustworthy, relevant and topical free content for audio-post and music studio professionals.

Five years ago, in the midst of Covid, Production Expert ran a survey to capture the financial health of freelancers in the professional audio industry. Five years on, it has just published its latest survey – and with the number of respondents almost doubled, it makes for sobering reading…work patterns have shifted, costs have risen and maintaining a steady income is clearly taking more effort than it once did.

At times, this is a frank and revealing conversation that makes for difficult listening (please note this episode does contain a reference to suicide); particularly as Russ dives into the survey and lifts the veil on what the true cost is to current craft creatives, in terms of their financial, physical and mental health.

About the presenters:

You can find out more about Russ Hughes's work here and here. The Production Expert website is here and you can read the 2026 Production Expert survey here.

Details about Neil Hillman and Jason Nicholas's work as dialogue editors and mixers and how to contact them is here.

Details of our 1-to-1, training and coaching programmes for ambitious media professionals are available at:

https://www.drneilhillman.com and https://soundproducer.com.au/coaching and www.soundformovingpictures.com

Details of Neil's books, including his best-seller 'Sound for Moving Pictures', are available here.

Technical notes:

Written, produced and presented by Jason Nicholas and Dr Neil Hillman – IMDb

Recorded using the CleanFeed remote recording system