My experience as a freelancer with Idol Corp
I've debated posting about this for quite a while, but it's gotten to the point where I don't think I have any other option.
I would like to shed some light on my interactions as a freelance mixer & audio engineer working with the VTuber agency Idol Corp.
I started working with Idol in December of last year when I was invited to do mixing and SFX for their Christmas voice packs. Over the course of the next few months, I did most of Idol's voice packs, and even worked on some covers!
Very often, these commissions would come in as rush projects, having sometimes less than 24 hours to be completed. For the Christmas VPs, I needed to do all of them on Christmas Eve and Christmas Morning, as I didn’t receive the commission any sooner, and they needed to get them out mid Christmas day.
I want to be clear and say that I never minded doing these rush jobs, because I could usually fit them in my schedule, and they never required an awful lot of work. I showed a lot of flexibility and always did my best to work fast and efficiently when they needed me.
This willingness to work fast in a time of need is important, because I received the exact opposite from them.
On 4 separate occasions in the span of 6 months, I did not receive payment on time, sometimes even having to wait 3 additional weeks before finally being paid for my work. Payments only go out once a month, meaning more than half of my invoices weren’t paid on time.
I always made sure to send my invoices on time, sent reminders when they needed to be paid, and made them as simple to review as possible.
However, invoices repeatedly went unpaid, or were even lost entirely, causing me lots of headaches in having to chase them up.
I have still yet to be paid for my work I did for them on June 13th at time of writing. At the end of June, an announcement was made that the next round of payments was starting, and we were asked to re-send links to our invoices to make sure they didn't miss any. 3 weeks later, no invoices have been paid so far. Normally I'm pretty flexible with this kind of stuff. The previous 3 times I was annoyed that I was being paid late, but I know that a VTuber agency can't be easy to run, and so I let them take their time.
Typically when I reached out about unpaid invoices, they were always paid within the next 48 hours.This time is different though. I have reached out on multiple separate occasions about payments this month, and all I have gotten back is a "We're working on it."
As some of you may know, I have just moved countries. I naturally made a lot of expenses in doing so, and not receiving payments for work I did leading up to the move (which I had to do to cover all my expenses) has really thrown a wrench in everything.
As a result, I reached out to other freelancers who have worked/are working for Idol to ask about whether they were being paid, and it seems I'm not alone. There are at least a dozen freelancers who have done work for Idol in June and have yet to be paid at the time of writing.
The commissions range from simple voice packs, to art and video editing, to mixing work for music, all of them unpaid for. I am lucky that my invoice isn't as big as those of other creators, but the combined total between all artists is large.
Now I want to be extremely clear that this is not the fault of the talents or the managers I have been speaking to. The talents are some of the loveliest people I have ever worked with, and some of them have even reached out to make sure I was being paid enough.
They are the reason I have continued to work with this agency despite the issues I've had, because at the end of the day I just want to work on cool things with cool people. Please don't send ANY hate to the Idol girls. They're the last people to deserve any.
The managers I have been speaking to have also been incredibly understanding and I believe are not at all at fault. They simply don't have the ability to do anything else but reach out to the people above them on my behalf, which they have consistently done immediately.
I am out of options. Reaching out to individual managers hasn't worked. Reaching out to the talents I have worked with hasn't worked. Posting about it in the channel all other freelancers have access to hasn't worked. This is my last resort.
Artists and freelancers are a giant part of the VTuber community. These artists have visibly been respected less and less over the years, and it's time for agencies and larger creators to stop taking advantage of us.
Without our creativity, they could not exist.
I am posting this simply to ask whoever in Idol is the end-responsible for the payments of artists, talents, and staff to please do their job and communicate with us. When you run a large business with lots of staff and freelancers working for you, you are directly responsible for the livelihoods of every single one of those people, and acting with this amount of negligence can and will have significant negative impacts on many of them.
If you made it to the end of this document and you want to help artists to be treated fairly, or you're someone impacted by this too, please help share this post to both help the freelancers not being paid by Idol, but also make future freelancers aware of this company's issues.
I will post updates about anything that comes from this down below to the best of my ability. Hopefully I'll be able to share some positive news soon.
Thank you all for reading
