Concert venues are filling up, summer festivals are in full swing, and artists are on the road for another summer touring season. Behind every one of those shows is a temporary workforce assembled fast: tour managers, production managers, lighting and sound technicians, merch staff, photographers, videographers, backline techs, and a dozen other roles that make a tour run. While many of these workers are brought on as independent contractors, you need to ensure such a classification is accurate. Misclassified contractors can lead to back wages, unpaid overtime, employer-side payroll tax liability, unemployment insurance assessments, and exposure to class or collective claims – potentially in every state the tour passed through.

A Written Contract Doesn’t Fully Protect You

Issuing a 1099 or signing an independent contractor agreement doesn’t settle the legal question in and of itself. Regulators and courts look at how the relationship actually functions, not what the paperwork says.

For touring crews, we often see problems arise when contractors:

• Travel exclusively with one artist or tour for months at a stretch
• Work under the day-to-day direction of tour management
• Perform work that’s integral to the production itself
• Follow schedules set by the tour, not schedules they set
• Use equipment and resources the production provides

Any of these facts alone might not tip the scale to a finding that the worker in question should actually be classified as an “employee.” But...

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