Deal types explained: landed, fee plus, flat guarantee

Every club offer settles two things: whether the fee is fixed or tied to ticket sales, and who pays to get the artist there. A flat guarantee is a fixed fee, however many tickets you sell. Landed and fee plus are about the journey, which is either inside the fee or on top of it. Most club bookings in Europe are a flat guarantee, landed or plus travel, and most misunderstandings start when someone shortens all of that to one number.

Fixed fee, and who pays the travel

A flat guarantee is paid in full if the show goes ahead as agreed, whether 200 people come or 2,000. The promoter carries the ticket risk and keeps the upside. If you’d rather share that risk with the artist, there are versus, door and bonus deals; we work through them with numbers in Versus, door and bonus deals: how settlement works.

Travel is a separate question. In a landed deal the artist side books and pays it out of the fee. In a fee plus deal the fee is for the performance only, and the promoter pays travel, hotel and ground transport on top.

So “€2,000 plus” and “€2,300 landed” are both flat guarantees. If an email only says “€2,000 flat”, write back and ask: plus what? Otherwise nobody books the flight, or both sides do.

Flat guarantee

The flat guarantee is the default for artists who travel to play. The number is fixed once the offer is accepted and is paid as long as the artist performs as agreed. If the night sells out, the extra is the promoter’s. If it doesn’t, the promoter covers the gap.

Artists price that in. Someone who carries no ticket risk asks for a fee that fits an average night, not their best one. If you’d rather pay less up front and give the artist part of the upside, look at a versus deal or a bonus. For a first show in a city, where nobody knows how it will sell, a bonus is often the easiest place to start, because it’s the easiest of the three to settle.

Landed

A landed fee includes getting the artist to the city and home again. The artist side picks and books the flights or trains, pays for them out of the fee and carries the price risk. If fares go up, that’s on them. If they find a cheaper route, they keep the difference.

Beyond the journey, people use “landed” loosely. Often the promoter still books the hotel and the local ground transport. When the hotel and transfers are inside the fee too, most people call it all-in, though not everyone does. Neither word is safe to rely on in an offer. List every item and write down who covers it.

Landed comes into its own when the artist plays several shows in a row (routing). Say the trip runs Berlin to Vienna on Friday, Vienna to Hamburg on Saturday and home on Sunday. With landed fees nobody has to split one set of tickets between three promoters: each pays a fixed number, and the journey is for the artist side to sort out.

Fee plus

With fee plus, the fee pays for the performance and nothing else. The promoter covers whatever the offer lists, usually flights or trains, the hotel and ground transport, sometimes per diems or backline.

Who books differs from deal to deal. Either the artist side sends preferred times and passenger names and the promoter buys the tickets, or the agency books and invoices the promoter at cost. Whichever way you do it, nobody buys a ticket the other side hasn’t approved. The cheap flight that lands an hour before the set, or a booking with a name that doesn’t match the passport, ends up costing more than it saved.

The fee stays comparable from show to show, and the promoter pays what the travel really costs. The price risk sits with the promoter, though, and a flight booked late can cost twice as much.

The same show, priced three ways

Say [Artist A] lives in Berlin and plays a Saturday at a 600-capacity club in Vienna. One person travels: a return flight, one hotel night, and transfers between the airport, the hotel and the club. Booked six weeks ahead, the travel comes to about:

• return flight Berlin–Vienna with a checked bag: €260
• hotel, one night: €140
• ground transport (airport to hotel, hotel to club and back, hotel to airport): €160
• together: €560

The artist side wants €2,000 for the performance. Three ways to put that on an offer:

The landed fee is €40 more than the performance fee and the expected fare together. Those €40 pay for carrying the fare risk and doing the booking, and the all-in fee adds a little for the hotel and transfers. Now say nobody gets round to booking until three weeks out and the flight costs €380. The fee plus total rises to €2,680. The landed and all-in numbers don’t move.

Compare the totals. A €2,300 landed fee and a €2,000 fee plus travel cost the promoter about the same; what changes is who books and who carries the risk.

Which one fits

If you’re the artist, one more thing. Agencies take commission on the fee, and part of a landed fee only passes through to the airline. Ask whether commission is taken on the whole landed fee or on what’s left after travel. At a commission of 15%, for example, that’s €345 on €2,300 against €306 on €2,040. On landed deals we take ours on what’s left after the travel we paid for, and either way it should be in writing before the first show.

When travel changes

Flights get cancelled and shows move. The deal type decides who pays for the fix, and that’s much easier to agree in the offer than on the phone at 6 a.m. with a cancelled flight.

• Fee plus: rebooking costs fall on the promoter, who pays the travel, unless the artist side caused them, for example by missing a flight it had approved.
• Landed and all-in: the artist side rebooks and pays, and the fee stays the same.
• The promoter moves or cancels the show: the change fees and lost tickets that follow are usually the promoter’s, whatever the deal type. A landed fee isn’t meant to pay for a new date the artist didn’t ask for. The cancellation terms should say so.
• More people travel: a tour manager, a VJ, a second performer. In fee plus, each one is another flight and another room on the promoter’s bill. In a landed deal, the offer names how many people the fee covers, so a second traveller is priced in when the offer goes out. Adding one later means reopening the fee.

Buyouts

A buyout is a fixed amount paid instead of something the promoter would otherwise provide. Typical ones in club booking:

• Hotel buyout: the artist stays with friends or prefers to book their own hotel, and the promoter pays, say, €140 instead.
• Dinner buyout: the venue has no kitchen, so the promoter pays €30 per travelling person instead of a meal.
• Ground buyout: the artist takes a taxi from the airport, and the promoter pays a fixed €60 instead of sending a driver.

A buyout is a fixed number on the offer, so nobody collects receipts afterwards. Agree it before the show and say whether it’s paid with the fee, on the same invoice. Both sides have to want the swap. If the rider asks for a hot meal and the venue has a kitchen, a promoter can’t decide on the night to hand over €30 instead.

Deposit and balance

A deposit secures the date. Once it’s paid, the artist turns down other requests for that night. In European club booking, a common split is:

• 50% deposit, due within one to two weeks of signing the contract
• 50% balance before the show, often 7 to 14 days ahead, or as the contract says

Festivals and larger shows sometimes pay in more steps. With fee plus, the travel money is needed before the balance, because flights are bought weeks ahead and whoever books needs the money then. Say in the offer when the travel is invoiced.

What happens to the deposit if the show is cancelled depends on who cancels and why. Write that into the cancellation terms while everyone is still on good terms.

What the offer must say

A clear offer names:

• the deal type in words, the fee and the currency, and whether VAT comes on top
• for a landed or all-in fee, what’s included and for how many travelling people
• every item and who covers it: flights or trains, hotel (rooms, nights, standard), ground transport, per diems, backline
• buyouts, each with an amount
• deposit and balance, with amounts, due dates and how they’re paid
• for artists based abroad, whether withholding tax applies and who carries it (Austria, Germany)
• set time and length, billing, the radius and the announcement date
• cancellation terms, and how long the offer is valid

Everything else, from pickup times to the guest list, goes into the advance once the contract is signed.