www.forbes.com: For the modern artist, the economic reality is uncompromising: touring is the cash engine. In a world where streaming royalties are structured like digital municipal bonds – slow, steady, and fractional – mega-festivals like Coachella are the high-yield assets. A single opening or headline slot can often be worth more than a year of catalog royalties, tempting artists to sign the festival contract with the biggest number and ask questions later.
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I am thinking about the interesting tradeoff of formality in the size of an event. For a small event happening in a basement bar, nobody is really caring about contracts or the consequences of what happens when something goes wrong. In a little venue like that there are a limited (although still significant) amount of damage that can be done. If something goes very wrong, someone will call the local emergency services and they will be able to take care of it.
A massive festival like this works on an entirely different scale. For one, there is just a lot more risk because there are so many more people and so much more money on the line. This leads to a world where everything is specified in contracts, and the lawyers have a big incentive to cast as much blame as possible on everyone other than themselves.
I was very much encouraged to see that the Event Safety Alliance was being referenced in this Forbes article, and is gaining traction in the industry. I think that they are doing great work to promote event safety, and I am glad that people are actually referencing their standards.
Nope, this should absolutely not be the case. Safety should always be number one, full stop. No “oh but the contract doesn't say you’re covered for a moving light falling on your head.” Every other workplace, if you get hurt in it by something other than you doing dumb shit you get paid for it, as in everything is taken care for you and you don’t need to worry about money. This should apply to the theatre contracts world as well, it should be standardized to where if you get hurt while performing for a concert, you are covered under them. This is extremely dumb it’s not like this, and should never be a contractual thing. No one should ever be cheaping out on safety, especially for talent. I think at the least, concerts should have at least an insurance company to handle this, like how workplaces have insurance to cover workplace injuries, maybe it shouldn’t even be in their contract. If you have to put it in the contract, it should be the standard, or better, workers compensation clauses.
To be honest, when I saw the words “Coachella” and “safety” in the same sentence, I thought this article was going to be about the light that didn’t have a safety and fell on top of an audience member. However, this is instead about economic security in an ever changing artistic landscape. In regards to both scenarios, however, this is not the mindset to be having. Safety should always come first, and people should never be left in the dark about what their expectations and obligations are. Artists like the ones who perform at Coachella work in a very different side of industry than live theatre actors, and their craft is more easily subject to AI. Because of the way that technology is shifting, the industry should work to support their talent rather than profiting off of them. I hope that going forward, there is more transparency in contractual obligations and that we are promoting a safe work environment for all who are involved.
Reading this article, or merely the headline, I’m reminded of how important in work environments something as necessary and implied as artist safety needs to be explicitly stated and outlined in projects. For an event as big and aspiring to technicians as Coachella, the amount of safety scandals that broke the news this year was absolutely absurd to me. From less than ideal weather conditions forcing cancellations, to outright ignorance and improper rigging causing hospitalization of audience members, it’s sad to see the consequences of improper theatrical safety. And as this article mentions, the physical technical aspect doesn’t even cover all of the potential safety violations that can happen with productions at this big a scale. Audience members throwing things onstage, or bypassing security by directly coming onstage next to the artists. No matter how many precautions we take, these things will always occur, even if not in the same manner. As they say, history never repeats itself, but it rhymes. Our responsibility as managers and technicians is to center the artist’s safety above all in as many ways as we can.
At first the title of this article was very alarming to me. As I wasn't sure if the article was implying that the Coachella venue was using artist safety as a bargaining chip when making contracts for the event. Fortunately this was not the case, and in fact I am glad that this article was made due to the fact that it shows that the event is aware of the concern to artists and the audience at packed and high energy events such as Coachella. I am honestly a little alarmed though that there was any debate about who the event should side with when it comes to security if things go wrong. The simple fact is that there will always be hundreds if not thousands more people in the audience as compared to the performing artist and their team and even the security for the event for that matter. As such the artist should get more support and protection when it comes to security risk situations between the performer and the audience. This article is completely correct that artists and their teams should make sure that they are aware of this decision when it comes to potential security risk events in the future.
This article provides an eye-opening perspective for anyone who believes that touring consists solely of music and financial compensation. It’s hard to imagine; but as artists gain popularity and move from performing in theater-style venues to playing massive music festivals such as Coachella, their contracts become less focused on the artist’s set list and are instead heavily focused on life-and-death issues related to safety. After all of the tragedy surrounding Astroworld, we can finally accept that "safety" should no longer be defined as something you can have a "good feeling" about; it now must be deemed as an absolute and be detailed in the actual contract's fine print, with actual measurable metrics. I have never considered that by simply stepping onto a stage, there is also a tremendous amount of exposure to legal liability as well. It’s actually quite frightening that you could be held liable in a lawsuit for a structural failure that occurred due to no fault of your own; you are no longer simply performing an act, but rather are acting as "the asset manager" of your career.
Let me list all the major newsworthy events I'm aware of in the concert industry lately. Astroworld, where people died because the event coordinators let too many people into the space, could have been prevented. The flood at Burning Man in 2023, where people were trapped in the desert for days on end. It could have also been prevented, but at the risk of everyone's tickets needing to be moved a weekend or two The recent Coachella Anyma shut down and the light falling. The light could have been prevented, but the wind cancelled the set for the better. Stagecoach was evacuated this weekend due to too much wind. All of these things could have been prevented with better planning, but the better thing to understand is that they weren't. Why? Where was the planning in this to prevent such things from happening? What does this mean for the future of the industry - do we put the fans' opinions over their safety, or the safety over the opinions?
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