A blog on Contracts from a Law Grad.
21/03/24 09:18
Ya'll need to start understanding and enforcing your rights!!
Understanding Contracts for Musicians.
(Please note - this blog does not constitute legal advice and I have no intention of creating any duty of care between myself and a reader. If you have a legal issue, this blog is general guidance from my observations from working in Music and from the theory studied during my Law study.)
If you hang around in musician circles for long enough you’re inevitably going to meet someone who’s had a gig cancelled without either notice, pay, or both, or someone simply hasn’t been paid for their work.
Instantly - the response is “well, did you have a contract?” The replies will vary from ‘no’, to ‘it was verbal’, to ‘yes’ but it wasn’t until I actually went through a Law Degree before I realised how much we really don’t know about contracts, and possibly how much engagers rely on us not knowing our rights under even the most basic of contracts.
The law is supposed to be accessible and understandable - after all, it’s literally the framework that dictates how we’re all supposed to act and interact with each other - but the nature of life itself means that how the law applies to every day and novel situations is nuanced and inherently complicated. It’s difficult to navigate and quite expensive to access, although if you’re an MU member, you have some level of access to formal advice.
But - when it comes to musicians contracts, and I’m talking mainly in the contexts of Pubs/Clubs and dep situations, things can possibly be quite cut and dry. In my experience - the agreements we make with band hire clients are fairly basic - usually reduced to texts.
My observation is that unscrupulous venue and band managers definitely play on the fact that musicians don’t really understand Contract law - and I’d probably argue that they don’t themselves either - and just consider a cancellation within any time frame to have no consequence.
And largely, they’re right - but I’d also argue that it’s only become this way because the aggrieved party don’t exercise their rights under a contract, thus propagating the myth that ‘it’s ok - nothing will happen’.
And this is the problem. It’s human nature to continue to try and get away with something if you think you can.
But these people shouldn’t be able to get away with breaching contracts on a whim - and they probably wouldn’t be able to if they were held to account.
I have been working in the music industry since 1998, professionally, and in 2020 I took a condensed law degree for the purposes of a career change. (Long story!) It was a life changing experience and I’d like to be able to help my colleagues arm themselves with a little basic information about contracts so that they’d know what to do when their contracts are breached, and they lose money.
I should also state that as I not a practicing or qualified Lawyer, this will not constitute legal advice and I will not be creating a duty of care towards a reader. This article will simply discuss the factual basis for contract creation and some suggestions for what to do if your contract is breached.
Bear in mind it’s still quite complicated, but I’ll be trying to make it as simple as possible!!!
• Yes - you have a contract!
First of all - if you’re a band playing in a pub or a club, or for a venue or promotor, in return for money - you’ll have a basic contract. If you’re a player depping into a band in return for money, you have a basic contract. But realise that you’re not interacting with these people as ‘friends’ - you’re interacting with them as a business transaction. Even if your band isn’t a business, you should absolutely think of it as a business when you’re providing your live music service to a business.
This is important.
• How is a contract formed.
This is where the water starts to boil. The Law regarding the formation of a contract is found across a number of common law principles - I.e the Judges defined it over the course of deciding novel historic cases.
For a contract to exist between 2 parties, there simply needs to be the following provable elements:
An offer (ie - “Will you play a gig for us?” Or “Can we play a gig for you?”) Acceptance of the offer (ie - “Yes, I accept your offer”) “Consideration” - for ease, let’s just say “money” but ‘consideration’ can literally be anything (even drinks!) and the consideration does not have to equal the value of your product. Intention for form a legally binding contract.
Contracts can be made formally or informally, verbally and in written form.
And this is largely the basic extend of it but what’s important during a dispute - and this is where this information is largely most important - is that the above is provable when you ask a Judge to enforce the terms of a contract, which will largely be “make them pay me this amount of money”.
But let’s discuss “terms” for a second”.
• Terms
The ‘terms of business’ will form an integral part of the “offer” stage. When the acceptance stage is met, this is the other party accepting the terms of the contract. These can literally be what ever you want them to be - stating an arrival time, how many players come with the fee, finishing time, state time, whether drinks are provided, who pays for advertising, etc, etc.
The other party can always disagree with terms and asked them to be removed, but that’s natural part of contract negotiation. It’s two parties agreeing to their obligations under the terms of the contract.
These are ‘express terms’ and there should be no ambiguity as two what the obligations of each party are where the terms of expressly written into the contract. (Even if you forget that they’re there!)
There are also implied terms, which are often statutory obligations written into every contract at legislation level. The Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982, for example, is essentially a list of contract terms that become attached to any contract and ensure terms like “products match their description” and “quality of work completed is at least equal to that of a reasonable professional undertaking the same role”.
These don’t need to be written into the contract, although you could if you want (!) - they’re always active and thus you should be aware of them, whether you use them for your own protection or whether you’re breaching them yourself and thus breaching your own contract.
It’s also worth being aware of these because if you yourself falls below that standard in your work, it’s grounds for the other party to refuse to pay, or, at least, ask for a price reduction. This is what we’d refer to as their ‘defences’. If they can show that you breached the contract by falling below standards, or not fulfilling your obligations and it injured them, they have a defence for not paying (or obtaining a price reduction.)
• Loss and Breach of Contract
A contract dispute/ breach of contract claim will occur when a loss has been made. Really, there’s no sense in having one if there hasn’t and no Judge would (likely) entertain a contract dispute if a loss hadn’t been suffered, or if the loss is super trivial - like the venue didn’t provide drinks when the contract terms expressly conferred that right. (And, frankly, you won’t pay the court fees to argue that case!)
But what we’re really talking about here is when a venue or client doesn’t pay you for work done, ie living up to their obligations under the terms of the contract - and ‘how much you’re being paid’ will be written into the discussion somewhere. If it isn’t, you’re literally at their mercy of how much they want to pay you - there are legal principles out there which dictate that consideration (pay) doesn’t have to be equal [to the work done].
But to not pay you is a ‘breach of contract’.
So let’s recap.
a. A contract WILL exist where there has been an offer, acceptance, consideration involved and an intention to create a legally binding agreement.
b. The offer doesn’t have to include any terms at all, but it’s sensible to define them if you want something specific to happen under the contract.
c. To be able to win a contract dispute - you have to be able to show the elements of the contract exist. It was only ever verbal, this will be hard. You may be able to glean some elements of a contract from texts/emails - and the fact that an event took place may well be enough to show that the most basic forms a contract were put in place for something to actually happen, but it becomes much harder to enforce.
d. Defences - If you do indeed decide to take a person or an individual to court to ask the court to enforce a contract, there are defences available to the defendant to be aware of. And understanding defences to a contract claim - ie. reasons why a contract claim would fail - can very much help you in forming your contracts in the first place or maybe realising that you’re wrong about whether someone actually owes you anything when things go wrong. These may well be things like not fulfilling your own obligations yourself under the contract, providing a vastly different product to the one advertised/sold, or performing to a lower standard than would be expected of a professional.
• Payment terms and Accumulating interest:
If you want to be paid within a specific time frame, you have to state this in the original offer/terms. But this doesn’t mean that a party under the contract can just make you wait perpetually. Without this expressly stated, payment terms can be defined by the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act which states that in the absence of payment terms, a client has 30 days to pay.
If they don’t pay, you have a legal right to add a late payment fee and begin adding daily interest as dictate by the act. Some contracts state that they don’t recognise late charges - if you’ve agreed to that term then you could well be out of luck. It’s entirely possible to sign away legislated rights under contract terms.
• So what could you do if a client doesn’t pay you?
a. Write to them, stating all of the facts of the engagement - when each of the contract elements “Offer”, “Acceptance”, and “Consideration” took place or were stated, and it’s worth arguing why you feel that the two parties meant to make a legally binding agreement. Quite simply - I’d suggest writing dispassionately and factually. Where someone has agreed to contract terms, they have an obligation to live up to them. Give them a time frame.
It’s worth being polite to start off with - a gentle nudge to remind the other party that they haven’t yet lived up to their obligation under the contract.
b. If they ignore you, write to them again and start adding the late fees stating the law that confers you that right.
c. If they continue ignoring you, you can either give up or go down the route of suing them formally and making a small claim through the county courts. It’s a small amount of money to submit your claim, but you’ll need to spend some time writing out your claim and submitting your evidence. If you can apply any relevant laws or precedents to your specific facts, do it.
The problem here is that you may not be able to recover your own costs from the other side if you win. So it might cost you. But you could always ask the judge to award you the costs. If it costs you £120 to make a claim for a £150 unpaid bill, they may take pity on you and instruct the other side to pay your costs.
After all, a breach of contract claim is designed to put you into the position you would have been in if the contract was fulfilled successfully - so you may well be able to argue for the Court to award fees to be paid.
It’s worth mentioning this in your letter. If you convince them that their bill is going to increase exponentially if they don’t pay, they may well pay up quickly. After all - this is probably why you pay parking fines quickly, right?!
d. If you’ve got this far and you’ve submitted your claim, you’ll just have to wait for an outcome. If you’ve shown everything you need to show to prove your contract, you may well be ok. It’ll likely require a Court appearance! That alone could be enough to make someone pay, but not turning up to court won’t automatically make it go away for the other party. They’ll simply not be there represent their side of the case, make their arguments why your case should fail, and you’ll probably be victorious.
• But when a victory isn’t a victory.
Quite simply - if you sue a venue or a promotor who you could work with a lot, they simply aren’t going to work with you again. Mind you - you could argue that if they’re non-payers, why would you want to continue working for them anyway?! But if they’re just late in paying, going in heavy handed could cost you future work. Be sensible in your decision making.
• Cancellations
In the event of a cancellation, all of the above is still valid. If a client cancels an event (cancels a contract) you can still hold them to the terms of the contract and hold them in breach of your agreement. Typically, a contract will only dissolve if both parties agree or it’s brought to a natural conclusion. This is largely why cancellation terms and force majeure terms are written in, so that both parties agree what will happen in the event of a cancellation. The cancellation terms fall under ‘terms’ - and what ever is agreed should be adhered to.
So if the cancellation terms state that cancellations within 3 months of the performance date will confer a 60% payment to the artist and the client agrees and goes through the acceptance stage, that’s a term they’ve agreed to. If there’s no terms of this nature, you could hold them to 100% of the contract price, or a judge may not make them pay anything. This is a tricky thing - if it’s not in writing, it’s up in the air and it could go either way.
• What about agencies or promotors?
If your work is booked through an agency or a promotor - your contract is with the agency, not the venue or end client. If you don’t make a contract with a specific party or entity, you can’t really hold them to any contract terms.
But that doesn’t mean you don’t have any rights - it just means you have to claim against the right party.
Where an agency is involved and the client cancels, you can make a claim against the agency for breach of contract and they in turn can make a claim against the client for their own breach. It’s an indirect way of going about it, but it’s the right way.
Agents, though, will fight tooth and nail against their own cancellation policies though - and clients can be flaky. Anyone can cancel at any time and for any reason but this is the danger in business. The reason we don’t always think about suing people who cancel is because we don’t want the negative press online and we’d rather be seen as kind so that they might return in the future. But this is you agreeing to dissolve the contract.
You can choose to do this with an agency. If you think you’ll get more work from them, it might be better for you to let it go (although keep an eye on it! You can still sue a couple of years later if no more work comes).
But if you feel aggrieved and you won’t work for them again, you could make a claim against them for breach of contract and claim what ever fee you’re entitled to under the terms. Only you can make this decision. They may use the old ‘we’ll tell everyone not to work with you’ line but only you can decide whether your market power is strong enough to withstand that kind of behaviour, if it does even happen!
If you’re an act that people want, it probably won’t matter who says what - the client wants what the client wants. But if you’re reliant on agency work, an agent may well think twice about working with you if you’re confident enough to sue for contract cancellations - after all, it happens all the time. Even though you’re in the right! Sadly, it’s how humans work. So few of us will think objectively about our actions.
• We’re going through it now - and I hope to grow the knowledge base of experience for you all.
I am currently going through a breach of contract case with a colleague who had a show cancelled without notification. I’ll be blogging on the whole process and the costs involved in due course.
And I’m part of a community rallied around a serial non-payer who I’m hoping will be able to discuss their experiences with me for expansion on this subject to help more people understand, and to encourage more people to enforce their rights.
Conclusion
So to conclude, if you’re faced with dealing with a contract breach where there’s either a cancellation or a non-payment, you will probably more likely than not be able to show that a contract exists and you could probably be successful in a contract claim - but would it be the right thing for your work. I feel that if professional clients (agencies, venues, promotors, etc) were held to account more, there would be fewer shady venues/promotors/agencies. For direct contracts, I’d argue it’s better to be kind and accommodating. Same with good venues/promotors/agencies - things can cause a cancellation at any time and maintaining good business relationships is definitely more important for long term work. You’d only really know the difference by how they deal with you and the cancellation/issue.
Hold the shitty ones to account - with any luck they’ll either sort themselves out or give up.
But maybe be a bit forgiving of the good ones - especially if they’re making work!
Updates from lawyers
If any lawyers read this and would like to suggest I make updates, please reach out. As I have said, I have no intention to create any duties of care and I believe that my blog is as generic as I can be without forming legal advice that people could rely on.
YouTube Videos to Watch.
I highly recommend these from Blackbelt Barrister. I did contact Daniel to do a YouTube discussion with me, but I didn’t get a response. Hopefully these will do, and hopefully you’ll be able to mine his channel for more.
Pre-issue steps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv6CdLPmTCE
How to win a legal dispute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6Um6W-G7I&t=2s
Are verbal contracts legal?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuhRmxplW_I
If you have any success stories - please share them.
(Please note - this blog does not constitute legal advice and I have no intention of creating any duty of care between myself and a reader. If you have a legal issue, this blog is general guidance from my observations from working in Music and from the theory studied during my Law study.)
If you hang around in musician circles for long enough you’re inevitably going to meet someone who’s had a gig cancelled without either notice, pay, or both, or someone simply hasn’t been paid for their work.
Instantly - the response is “well, did you have a contract?” The replies will vary from ‘no’, to ‘it was verbal’, to ‘yes’ but it wasn’t until I actually went through a Law Degree before I realised how much we really don’t know about contracts, and possibly how much engagers rely on us not knowing our rights under even the most basic of contracts.
The law is supposed to be accessible and understandable - after all, it’s literally the framework that dictates how we’re all supposed to act and interact with each other - but the nature of life itself means that how the law applies to every day and novel situations is nuanced and inherently complicated. It’s difficult to navigate and quite expensive to access, although if you’re an MU member, you have some level of access to formal advice.
But - when it comes to musicians contracts, and I’m talking mainly in the contexts of Pubs/Clubs and dep situations, things can possibly be quite cut and dry. In my experience - the agreements we make with band hire clients are fairly basic - usually reduced to texts.
My observation is that unscrupulous venue and band managers definitely play on the fact that musicians don’t really understand Contract law - and I’d probably argue that they don’t themselves either - and just consider a cancellation within any time frame to have no consequence.
And largely, they’re right - but I’d also argue that it’s only become this way because the aggrieved party don’t exercise their rights under a contract, thus propagating the myth that ‘it’s ok - nothing will happen’.
And this is the problem. It’s human nature to continue to try and get away with something if you think you can.
But these people shouldn’t be able to get away with breaching contracts on a whim - and they probably wouldn’t be able to if they were held to account.
I have been working in the music industry since 1998, professionally, and in 2020 I took a condensed law degree for the purposes of a career change. (Long story!) It was a life changing experience and I’d like to be able to help my colleagues arm themselves with a little basic information about contracts so that they’d know what to do when their contracts are breached, and they lose money.
I should also state that as I not a practicing or qualified Lawyer, this will not constitute legal advice and I will not be creating a duty of care towards a reader. This article will simply discuss the factual basis for contract creation and some suggestions for what to do if your contract is breached.
Bear in mind it’s still quite complicated, but I’ll be trying to make it as simple as possible!!!
First of all - if you’re a band playing in a pub or a club, or for a venue or promotor, in return for money - you’ll have a basic contract. If you’re a player depping into a band in return for money, you have a basic contract. But realise that you’re not interacting with these people as ‘friends’ - you’re interacting with them as a business transaction. Even if your band isn’t a business, you should absolutely think of it as a business when you’re providing your live music service to a business.
This is important.
This is where the water starts to boil. The Law regarding the formation of a contract is found across a number of common law principles - I.e the Judges defined it over the course of deciding novel historic cases.
For a contract to exist between 2 parties, there simply needs to be the following provable elements:
Contracts can be made formally or informally, verbally and in written form.
And this is largely the basic extend of it but what’s important during a dispute - and this is where this information is largely most important - is that the above is provable when you ask a Judge to enforce the terms of a contract, which will largely be “make them pay me this amount of money”.
But let’s discuss “terms” for a second”.
The ‘terms of business’ will form an integral part of the “offer” stage. When the acceptance stage is met, this is the other party accepting the terms of the contract. These can literally be what ever you want them to be - stating an arrival time, how many players come with the fee, finishing time, state time, whether drinks are provided, who pays for advertising, etc, etc.
The other party can always disagree with terms and asked them to be removed, but that’s natural part of contract negotiation. It’s two parties agreeing to their obligations under the terms of the contract.
These are ‘express terms’ and there should be no ambiguity as two what the obligations of each party are where the terms of expressly written into the contract. (Even if you forget that they’re there!)
There are also implied terms, which are often statutory obligations written into every contract at legislation level. The Supply of Goods and Services Act 1982, for example, is essentially a list of contract terms that become attached to any contract and ensure terms like “products match their description” and “quality of work completed is at least equal to that of a reasonable professional undertaking the same role”.
These don’t need to be written into the contract, although you could if you want (!) - they’re always active and thus you should be aware of them, whether you use them for your own protection or whether you’re breaching them yourself and thus breaching your own contract.
It’s also worth being aware of these because if you yourself falls below that standard in your work, it’s grounds for the other party to refuse to pay, or, at least, ask for a price reduction. This is what we’d refer to as their ‘defences’. If they can show that you breached the contract by falling below standards, or not fulfilling your obligations and it injured them, they have a defence for not paying (or obtaining a price reduction.)
A contract dispute/ breach of contract claim will occur when a loss has been made. Really, there’s no sense in having one if there hasn’t and no Judge would (likely) entertain a contract dispute if a loss hadn’t been suffered, or if the loss is super trivial - like the venue didn’t provide drinks when the contract terms expressly conferred that right. (And, frankly, you won’t pay the court fees to argue that case!)
But what we’re really talking about here is when a venue or client doesn’t pay you for work done, ie living up to their obligations under the terms of the contract - and ‘how much you’re being paid’ will be written into the discussion somewhere. If it isn’t, you’re literally at their mercy of how much they want to pay you - there are legal principles out there which dictate that consideration (pay) doesn’t have to be equal [to the work done].
But to not pay you is a ‘breach of contract’.
So let’s recap.
a. A contract WILL exist where there has been an offer, acceptance, consideration involved and an intention to create a legally binding agreement.
b. The offer doesn’t have to include any terms at all, but it’s sensible to define them if you want something specific to happen under the contract.
c. To be able to win a contract dispute - you have to be able to show the elements of the contract exist. It was only ever verbal, this will be hard. You may be able to glean some elements of a contract from texts/emails - and the fact that an event took place may well be enough to show that the most basic forms a contract were put in place for something to actually happen, but it becomes much harder to enforce.
d. Defences - If you do indeed decide to take a person or an individual to court to ask the court to enforce a contract, there are defences available to the defendant to be aware of. And understanding defences to a contract claim - ie. reasons why a contract claim would fail - can very much help you in forming your contracts in the first place or maybe realising that you’re wrong about whether someone actually owes you anything when things go wrong. These may well be things like not fulfilling your own obligations yourself under the contract, providing a vastly different product to the one advertised/sold, or performing to a lower standard than would be expected of a professional.
• Payment terms and Accumulating interest:
If you want to be paid within a specific time frame, you have to state this in the original offer/terms. But this doesn’t mean that a party under the contract can just make you wait perpetually. Without this expressly stated, payment terms can be defined by the Late Payment of Commercial Debts (Interest) Act which states that in the absence of payment terms, a client has 30 days to pay.
If they don’t pay, you have a legal right to add a late payment fee and begin adding daily interest as dictate by the act. Some contracts state that they don’t recognise late charges - if you’ve agreed to that term then you could well be out of luck. It’s entirely possible to sign away legislated rights under contract terms.
• So what could you do if a client doesn’t pay you?
a. Write to them, stating all of the facts of the engagement - when each of the contract elements “Offer”, “Acceptance”, and “Consideration” took place or were stated, and it’s worth arguing why you feel that the two parties meant to make a legally binding agreement. Quite simply - I’d suggest writing dispassionately and factually. Where someone has agreed to contract terms, they have an obligation to live up to them. Give them a time frame.
It’s worth being polite to start off with - a gentle nudge to remind the other party that they haven’t yet lived up to their obligation under the contract.
b. If they ignore you, write to them again and start adding the late fees stating the law that confers you that right.
c. If they continue ignoring you, you can either give up or go down the route of suing them formally and making a small claim through the county courts. It’s a small amount of money to submit your claim, but you’ll need to spend some time writing out your claim and submitting your evidence. If you can apply any relevant laws or precedents to your specific facts, do it.
The problem here is that you may not be able to recover your own costs from the other side if you win. So it might cost you. But you could always ask the judge to award you the costs. If it costs you £120 to make a claim for a £150 unpaid bill, they may take pity on you and instruct the other side to pay your costs.
After all, a breach of contract claim is designed to put you into the position you would have been in if the contract was fulfilled successfully - so you may well be able to argue for the Court to award fees to be paid.
It’s worth mentioning this in your letter. If you convince them that their bill is going to increase exponentially if they don’t pay, they may well pay up quickly. After all - this is probably why you pay parking fines quickly, right?!
d. If you’ve got this far and you’ve submitted your claim, you’ll just have to wait for an outcome. If you’ve shown everything you need to show to prove your contract, you may well be ok. It’ll likely require a Court appearance! That alone could be enough to make someone pay, but not turning up to court won’t automatically make it go away for the other party. They’ll simply not be there represent their side of the case, make their arguments why your case should fail, and you’ll probably be victorious.
• But when a victory isn’t a victory.
Quite simply - if you sue a venue or a promotor who you could work with a lot, they simply aren’t going to work with you again. Mind you - you could argue that if they’re non-payers, why would you want to continue working for them anyway?! But if they’re just late in paying, going in heavy handed could cost you future work. Be sensible in your decision making.
• Cancellations
In the event of a cancellation, all of the above is still valid. If a client cancels an event (cancels a contract) you can still hold them to the terms of the contract and hold them in breach of your agreement. Typically, a contract will only dissolve if both parties agree or it’s brought to a natural conclusion. This is largely why cancellation terms and force majeure terms are written in, so that both parties agree what will happen in the event of a cancellation. The cancellation terms fall under ‘terms’ - and what ever is agreed should be adhered to.
So if the cancellation terms state that cancellations within 3 months of the performance date will confer a 60% payment to the artist and the client agrees and goes through the acceptance stage, that’s a term they’ve agreed to. If there’s no terms of this nature, you could hold them to 100% of the contract price, or a judge may not make them pay anything. This is a tricky thing - if it’s not in writing, it’s up in the air and it could go either way.
• What about agencies or promotors?
If your work is booked through an agency or a promotor - your contract is with the agency, not the venue or end client. If you don’t make a contract with a specific party or entity, you can’t really hold them to any contract terms.
But that doesn’t mean you don’t have any rights - it just means you have to claim against the right party.
Where an agency is involved and the client cancels, you can make a claim against the agency for breach of contract and they in turn can make a claim against the client for their own breach. It’s an indirect way of going about it, but it’s the right way.
Agents, though, will fight tooth and nail against their own cancellation policies though - and clients can be flaky. Anyone can cancel at any time and for any reason but this is the danger in business. The reason we don’t always think about suing people who cancel is because we don’t want the negative press online and we’d rather be seen as kind so that they might return in the future. But this is you agreeing to dissolve the contract.
You can choose to do this with an agency. If you think you’ll get more work from them, it might be better for you to let it go (although keep an eye on it! You can still sue a couple of years later if no more work comes).
But if you feel aggrieved and you won’t work for them again, you could make a claim against them for breach of contract and claim what ever fee you’re entitled to under the terms. Only you can make this decision. They may use the old ‘we’ll tell everyone not to work with you’ line but only you can decide whether your market power is strong enough to withstand that kind of behaviour, if it does even happen!
If you’re an act that people want, it probably won’t matter who says what - the client wants what the client wants. But if you’re reliant on agency work, an agent may well think twice about working with you if you’re confident enough to sue for contract cancellations - after all, it happens all the time. Even though you’re in the right! Sadly, it’s how humans work. So few of us will think objectively about our actions.
• We’re going through it now - and I hope to grow the knowledge base of experience for you all.
I am currently going through a breach of contract case with a colleague who had a show cancelled without notification. I’ll be blogging on the whole process and the costs involved in due course.
And I’m part of a community rallied around a serial non-payer who I’m hoping will be able to discuss their experiences with me for expansion on this subject to help more people understand, and to encourage more people to enforce their rights.
Conclusion
So to conclude, if you’re faced with dealing with a contract breach where there’s either a cancellation or a non-payment, you will probably more likely than not be able to show that a contract exists and you could probably be successful in a contract claim - but would it be the right thing for your work. I feel that if professional clients (agencies, venues, promotors, etc) were held to account more, there would be fewer shady venues/promotors/agencies. For direct contracts, I’d argue it’s better to be kind and accommodating. Same with good venues/promotors/agencies - things can cause a cancellation at any time and maintaining good business relationships is definitely more important for long term work. You’d only really know the difference by how they deal with you and the cancellation/issue.
Hold the shitty ones to account - with any luck they’ll either sort themselves out or give up.
But maybe be a bit forgiving of the good ones - especially if they’re making work!
Updates from lawyers
If any lawyers read this and would like to suggest I make updates, please reach out. As I have said, I have no intention to create any duties of care and I believe that my blog is as generic as I can be without forming legal advice that people could rely on.
YouTube Videos to Watch.
I highly recommend these from Blackbelt Barrister. I did contact Daniel to do a YouTube discussion with me, but I didn’t get a response. Hopefully these will do, and hopefully you’ll be able to mine his channel for more.
Pre-issue steps
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Yv6CdLPmTCE
How to win a legal dispute
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WJ6Um6W-G7I&t=2s
Are verbal contracts legal?
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xuhRmxplW_I
If you have any success stories - please share them.
blog comments powered by Disqus