Earlier this Fall I had a friend who was relatively new to the business of presenting performances. An agent had rattled off a series of numbers as part of the performance fee deal an touring group was looking to get and my friend had no idea how to interpret those numbers.
I realized these type of arrangements probably confuse a great number of people in the business, both presenters and touring artists, so I wrote an Arts Hacker post about some of the more common deal structures for performances.
If you are a presenter and you don’t know what $40,000/10% NBOR/60-40 split on overages refers to, it is difficult to decide if you can meet your budget for the show.
Likewise, if you are a musician going into a music venue and they are offering you a percentage of net deal, before you accept you’ll want a pretty good sense of what the potential gross is and just what expenses the venue will be subtracting out before you get paid.
