I'm a composer/sound designer/dialogue editor living in Los Angeles, CA. Over the last four years I've done a bunch of freelance working on student/indie film and game projects. I have some credits and even an imdb page now. I feel like I'm moving in the right direction.

The problem is that all the gigs I've done so far have been for no pay. I get to keep the rights to my music, which is good. I also understand when starting out you have to take some free gigs just to get some credits and get started. However I feel like I'm at the point where I feel I need to jump into getting the paid gigs. I don't want to develop the reputation that I will do everything for free, as it is not feasible to live.

Now that I sort of have my foot in the door, how do I get to the next step? I would appreciate any advice/insight. I've been continuing to make more and more contacts. Having lived in the same place for a few years has helped because I have genuine friendships now and it's more than superficial schmoozing at parties. Aside from continuing to do that, any other suggestions?

What level of games do you want to work in? Most AAA studios have on-site, full-time audio people. If that's where you want to be, then an approach would be applying to studios. There are a crap ton of studios in LA.

-me

I'm happy with working on either AAA titles or smaller stuff. I don't want to be too picky. Ideally though I think I would enjoy working within a studio (large or small) working on smaller titles such as the ones that are on XBox Live Arcade or PSN. A lot of my favorite games this generation have been ones I've played on those platforms.

I've checked out a lot of studios in the LA area and it's a mixed bag of places that have an in house audio department, like Blizzard or places that just do contracts and never actually post when they need audio people. There's probably a lot of other smaller studios that do work for some of the bigger companies that I don't know exist yet.