After excitedly booking her performance at next week’s South by Southwest music festival, Zoe Meadthe British shoegaze artist known as Wyldest tried to secure other US club and festival gigs to offset her already hefty travel expenses.
Doing all this legally, she learned, requires obtaining a temporary work visa, costing $460 plus another $2,800 for faster processing. Hiring a lawyer or immigration specialist to file the application would add at least another thousand dollars to the bill. “It’s just too risky,” she says. “You have to reject a hell of a lot, which is really frustrating.”
And starting April 1, immigration and entry visa costs for international artists playing festivals, concerts or record label events in the US will rise even further.
Application fees for O and P visas — the former covering “individuals of exceptional ability,” the latter “internationally renowned performing groups” and musical ensembles of up to 25 people — will increase from $460 to a maximum cost of $1,655 and $1,615, respectively. That price includes a $600 Asylum Program fee, which USCIS will use to offset the costs of processing cases of immigrants seeking asylum from persecution and violence, a process unrelated to the music business.
However, there are reduced rates for visa applications supported by a promoter, agency, festival or record company (the so-called petitioner) with fewer than 25 full-time employees. For these companies, the new fee is capped at $830 (including a $300 shelter fee). For non-profit petitions, the total fee is capped at $530. (Crews and traveling production staff also require either an appropriate O or P visa to work in the US, while artists invited to perform at official showcase events like SXSW, like Mead, may be able to enter the US using an ESTA/ Visa Waiver which costs $21).
USCIS officials say the increased fees will cover rising business costs and reduce processing backlogs. They also claim that the price hike will not affect musicians as promoters, club owners and labels will pay the fees.
This is cold comfort to international artists – especially those starting their live careers – who fear that these costs will eventually be passed on to them, making it too expensive for all but established artists to play at concerts in the USA. “It will have a chilling effect,” he says Rita Sostrin, a Los Angeles-based immigration attorney who represents many international acts. “I’m certainly hearing a lot of frustration from my customers about these higher fees.”
The fear among international artists, especially those early in their live careers, is that the additional costs will eventually be passed on to them, making it too expensive for all but established international acts to play American concert halls and festivals. “This burden of applying and paying for visas is shared between artists, managers, promoters and venues,” says Nita Ragovanski, president of the US Music Executives Forum, which opposes the fee increase. “It’s going to affect artists’ decisions about how these tours go,” she says.
Last year, USCIS temporarily suspended plans to increase the fees after strong opposition from artists and music industry advocacy groups such as the National Independent Venue Association and UK Music.
The new fees, which come into effect on April 1, are nominally lower than the non-differentiated increases first proposed by USCIS, but still represent a “significant additional burden on UK touring bands and artists, particularly emerging acts who operate on the lowest margins,” says UK Music’s Interim CEO Tom Keel.
Those margins are further squeezed by the majority of international artists having to pay to process “premium” visas, says Andy Corriganowner of UK-based Viva La Visa, which specializes in immigration services for music artists and has recently worked to organize a US tour for The Damned and former Spice Girl Melanie C. Premium processing fees rose in February from $2,500 to $2,805 with the application processing time increasing from 15 calendar days to 15 working days.
“Almost every group we work with has to use premium because standard processing is so insecure,” he says. “The whole system is loaded against new and emerging artists. This is grossly unfair.”
Corrigan says he has lowered his company’s visa fees since the price hike “to try to mitigate the cost increase for everyone,” but fears some artists will be tempted to enter the U.S. illegally without proper documentation for visa, as a result of the additional financial burden placed on them.
“People need to take a longer view and recognize the value of cultural exchange and music, and not just think they can squeeze every dollar out of the sector,” says John Collins, chief executive of UK industry trade group LIVE. He calls USCIS’s January surprise announcement of the visa fee increase – after a consultation period – a “fait accompli” that will have a detrimental effect on the health of the UK and US domestic music industry.
“It feels like you’re constantly getting punched in the face,” says Mead, who had to turn down an invitation to play a pre-SXSW festival, New Colossus, in New York next month. “It was already expensive and they put it up even more, and it’s like, ‘how?’
