Festival management and finances: artist fees

The financial management of a festival is a complicated process since there are hundreds of different sources of incomes and hundreds of small payments to small companies, artists, stuff, technics and others. Also, many festival related payments feature special circumstances and methods of payments, which are not many times compatible with the accounting formulas of the accounting software’s (in Finnish = kirjanpito-ohjelma) and the ways of the accounting companies. Added to this, rules and regulations for taxation take very poorly into account the life of the artists or event managers and accountants.

Of course the easiest way for both parties is simple billing between them and this is what mostly happens – however, the thing which makes this a tricky question many times is that festival production needs many services already way before the actual event, but many times only a small share of the money needed to put up the whole thing is already there – the main finance being the quests who buy the tickets and use their money on the festival area. Many event give large efforts on their pre-sale just for this reason. And of course there is also the more convenient way of arranging the event when knowing approximately what size the audience is.

The artists give some headache with their payments sometimes. Most of the recording artists have a company through which they are billing their performance fees, or they have a manager who does the billing for them and then pays fees for the musicians. But in these days of do it yourself culture many artists have decided to handle these businesses (as many others as well such as the work of a record label) themselves, mainly to keep the share of a manager, PR, booking agency or any other middleman for themselves. In these cases you can come across with variety of ways of payments the most common being the paying of the fee in cash and getting a receipt on spot. This makes however very difficult to keep the records up to date during the event and since needs a precise handling on the accounts.