Why Have a Contract for a Rock Show

Video Transcript

Hi. This is David Jackel on behalf of Expert Village. And I'm here to talk to you about contracts and verbal agreements when you're putting together a show at a club. Now most books, most how-to books that talk about how to put together a show for musicians will say that there's a standard contract form that you want to give to venues before you play because you want to have everything out in paper. Well that sounds really nice, but good luck actually doing it. If you contact the venue, you talk to the booking agent and you say, "hey, can we do the show" and they say, "sure" and you work it all out, it's usually very informal. If you say, "okay, I'm going to fax over a contract", they're probably going to laugh. Almost nobody operates that way on a smaller scale. Large venues, sure, but places where your draw is going to be twenty to forty people, or even under a hundred, you're not going to have a contract. So don't even bother trying. The best thing to do is to follow up with an e-mail. That way you have some record of your deal. So if someone tries to bail out on you at the last minute, and let's say you do a show and the door brings in two thousand dollars and you're owed five hundred dollars and they never pay you, and they said they were going to pay you and they say it in e-mail, then you can take them to Small Claim's Court if you have to. But generally speaking, most places run on hand shakes, and verbal agreements. So you're going to have to work within that. The reality is, almost all venues, particularly the small ones, are part of the larger music community in the area. And they're, everybody knows each other. Reputation is very important. So what you want to do is deal honorably and only associate with people who do that. If there's a club where people aren't being honorable and you know that bands are getting cheated, you just stay away from there. Don't worry about it. Those clubs usually go out of business after a while.

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