Originally Posted by marcop

In 2006 and 2007 some of the bigger agencies became very aggressive about pushing girls' rates up. Consequently, I started booking a lot of girls direct--which is not hard to do. Also, as rates went up, so the amount of work that agents were booking for most girls went down... In early 2007, I called one agent and offered $800 for a specific model for an easy and quick b/g scene... and he told me the girl wanted $900. He was unwilling to negotiate, and as I had a thin margin on the shoot, I booked another girl. A couple weeks later the $900 model came to my studio to pick up her roommate, who I was shooting, and she told me she hadn't worked in over a month!

I know of girls who've been in the biz for a while who are now booking b/g shoots for $500 and $600 dollars, even though they insist on the fiction that their "rate" is $1,000 or whatever. I've never seen such an over-supply of female talent in the 12 years I've been shooting. That, coupled with the downturn in the business, which has caused people to cut down on shooting, meant that prices had to come down. IMHO, prices for talent will continue to fall--at least until shooting picks up again.