A Canceled Flight is Bad Enough. But What Happens when the Tour is Canceled?
The abrupt cancelations of several high-profile tours in the last year reveal the financial risks that touring professionals, including FOH and monitor mixers, have to accept in a much more active and unpredictable touring market and moment.
Last November, Kanye West checked into a Los Angeles hospital for “observation,” during his “Saint Pablo” tour. His week-long stay there effectively canceled the remaining 22 dates of the Live Nation-backed tour. And last July, Justin Bieber curtailed his 18-month-long Purpose World Tour 14 shows early, for reasons similarly vague.
What About the Crew?
In Bieber’s case, it at least raised questions in the media about what would become of the 200 or so crew members left hanging when the star heads off to cure “exhaustion.” The answers, however, left much to be desired.
A reporter from TMZ cornered Bieber at a steakhouse shortly after the tour ended and asked about those now work-bereft staffers. “They’re not my staff,” he told the reporter. As Britain’s Daily Mail later noted, “He insisted that he doesn’t personally employ them, so he feels no responsibility for leaving them without work.”
Bieber reportedly was undergoing a religious experience, so we’ll leave him to his karma. Kanye West, more pragmatically, knows where to seek compensation. In early August, the rapper filed a federal lawsuit accusing several insurance companies of refusing to pay out at nearly $10 million in claims he sought for the canceled tour.
The Lloyd’s of London syndicate member companies that underwrite the insurance for the tour (consortia insurance arrangements like this are common, given the enormous sums involved at the upper end of touring) delayed a decision on the claims, then filed a countersuit later that month.
At issue: whether the abuse of drugs played any sort of role in West’s health issues, which would void the claim. Lloyd’s was loathe to disclose specifics in its investigation of their client, but cited “substantial irregularities” as the basis for the countersuit.
Other tours have been abruptly terminated this year for reasons other than the capriciousness of their stars. Linkin Park’s One More Light 30-show North American tour leg was shut down following the death of frontman Chester Bennington in July, and the last six dates left on Soundgarden’s North American tour were cancelled following the death of singer Chris Cornell in May.
What goes unreported in these and other instances are how abruptly the lives and careers — and finances — of the scores or in some cases hundreds of support workers these tours carry are changed for the worse.
Feeling The Pain
Touring has become a much more financially complicated proposition, with record tickets sales propelling more artists out on the road with more elaborate (and thus costly) productions at a time when more things can push a tour off kilter, such as increased threats from terrorism resulting in canceled shows, or off the rails altogether.
Arianna Grande declared her 2017 Dangerous Woman tour cancelled within hours after the attack on the Manchester Arena on May 22, only to reinstate it after a two-week hiatus. The singer was lauded for her gutsy return to the U.K. for the “One Love Manchester” benefit concert June 4 after a suicide bomber killed 22 concert-goers and injured 250. But the decision to resume the tour (June 7, in Paris) also may have been prompted in no small part by the costs that a full cancellation would have incurred.
Tour-cancellation insurance might have covered much of that, but probably not without a fight of the sort that the Foo Fighters had to mount after they were compelled to cancel shows in 2015, first after frontman Dave Grohl broke his leg, and later, for the European dates canceled in the wake of the horrific 2015 Bataclan attack in Paris. The lawsuit, against Lloyd’s and Robertson Taylor, was subsequently settled, as Kanye West’s will likely ultimately be. And at that point, many crewmembers may be made partially or fully whole. But in the meantime, if the artists are not in a position to make bridge payments, workers are often out of luck and money.
It’s Rough Out There
As Rolling Stone recently reported, it’s been a rough year for some in the touring business, particularly on the festival side — the Pemberton Festival in British Columbia went belly up, the Fyre Festival famously flamed out after attendees arrived in the Bahamas expecting an island paradise only to find themselves trapped in a disorganized nightmare, and the Karoondinha festival in Pennsylvania went down once it became clear costs were outpacing sales. The loss of these dates puts dents into tour budgets that artists scramble to fill.
What happens to sound and other support personnel when a tour suddenly hits the brakes depends to a large degree on what happened well before the wheels left the ground. Theoretically, as an independent contractor, an FOH or monitor mixer or system technician can try to negotiate for exactly that scenario. In reality, it rarely happens.
A mixer who has been working with an established artist for a lengthy period of time has the best leverage, and the rare salary positions that come with that kind of tenure mean that a paycheck gets printed every two weeks no matter what happens. Below that tier, anything goes, from a severance-type payment in the event of an abrupt cancellation to… nothing. And that can be the case even is there is a short-term agreement in place between the mixer and the artist (or more often, their business management company).
To the extent that provisions for unforeseen circumstances can be written into a contract, the better it is for the mixer. But that’s just not going to happen in many if not most cases. And in the event of an “act of God” — that phrase can encompass anything from a terror attack to an unexpected pregnancy on the part of the lead singer — the management company is going to use that to relieve itself of liability. And quite honestly, if they didn’t, they’d be failing their client as a fiduciary. So those in the trenches don’t have much leverage.
“Lots of Variables”
Brad Divens, who has spent the last three years mixing FOH for Enrique Iglesias, agrees that most audio professionals don’t have financial protection from tour cancellations. “The thing is, there are a lot of variables,” he says. “There are acts of God, people get sick. But if an artist simply ends a tour short, then yeah, they should accept some liability for the people who had agreed to stay out on the road with him for a certain period of time.”
Which would bring us back to Bieber, who, as he so often does, speaks directly from his id (just like Donald Trump on Twitter) and tells the world, essentially, “These people are not my problem.” But they are, at least ethically and morally, if not legally. But without the necessary clout to compel an artist to provide for a contingency like a suddenly truncated tour, they’ll have very few options.
One course is to sue, or threaten to, but that’s the nuclear option: unless you’re suing for damages in addition to lost pay, a lawyer will bill by the hour instead of taking a contingency. If enough people are harmed by a stopped tour, then there’s the possibility of a group action, with a single attorney representing several clients who would share that cost. But in an industry that’s populated by freelancers and cowboys, that’d be like herding cats.
There is no good answer here, other than to suggest that, if you think your value to an artist is clear and significant, you ask for a contingency in your agreement. Stipulate that if the term you’re willing to sign on for ends short, and the reasons are within the artist’s control, that all or some portion of what you would have earned be paid to you. It’s not a standard in the industry — it should be, but so should a lot of things. It has to start somewhere.
