Contractor Blues

I’ve posted before that while sometimes it seems daunting and time consuming, creative professionals often need to think more like a small business and accept the necessary evils of financial management, bookkeeping, sales and marketing and other business issues.  Although these activities do require some time commitment—taking the artist away from creating their art or practicing their craft—a little bit of upfront effort on certain matters will pay dividends in the future. 

One such area concerns contracts and agreements.  Many creative professionals work on a freelance basis and have a host of different clients and vendors to whom they provide services or whom they hire for projects.  In many cases—live music performance and audio recording especially—the transactions take place with a handshake or a verbal agreement.  Often this simple verbal agreement will allow the transaction to take place without a hitch.  Artists that have developed strong relationships with their clients feel comfortable operating this way.  However the real need for contracts and agreements is to try to plan for when the transaction does not go according to plan, and work out ahead of time how the artist and client will agree to disagree when the contracts may be enforced in the courts.

I strongly advocate to all of my fellow musicians and teaching artists that they work with contracts all the time.  However, many don’t and for a myriad of reasons.   Many musicians are paid in cash for their performances and worry that if they use a contract it will create a paper trail of their earnings (it will).  Years ago most clubs and concert halls only hired union musicians, but nowadays freelance musicians play at nonunion clubs and restaurants, so there is no system in place to enforce contracts and protect the working musicians. Furthermore many of my friends in the music business feel that if they request that a club sign a contract there would be a backlash against them and the club would just hire another performer who wouldn’t require a contract.  These musicians feel as though they have no leverage. 

What I suggest is that freelance creative professionals take some time to study the basics of contracts, become familiar with some typical contract formats and have a “go to” contract template that they are comfortable tailoring to fit different clients and projects.  Todd Masuda, a local attorney with a very strong arts background was kind enough to present a Contract Basics for Creative Businesses workshop at COSE’s 2009 Small Business Conference.  He also stopped by our office after the Conference to record this brief podcast summarizing his presentation and giving a few key points that will help artists start to consider the issue of contracts.  Please click HERE to hear Todd’s podcast.