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+--- Thread: Insurance (/Thread-Insurance)
Insurance - Loftän - 09 Mar 2018
Hello everyone, hi Shannon and Jamie!
We recently played a Sofar Sound show in our hometown and our friends wanted to hear about house concerts and now we have some people who are interested in hosting a house concert themself.
One person owns a business and she was thinking of doing a concert at her business location which is a great, open space. But she is worried about insurance and what happens if something happens and what if people want to bring their own beers or two...
We have another person who is worried about their private home and what if people get drunk and drive home and have an accident etc.
What do you tell people if they worry about these type of situations? And how can we protect ourselves from being sued just because someone knocked over a vase or tripped over a carpet or....
Any tips on how you and other handle this would be wonderful.
Thank you for sharing all of your house concert wisdom with other musicians. It is greatly appreciated!
- Julia
RE: Insurance - jamie - 15 Mar 2018
(09 Mar 2018, 03:37 PM)Loftän Wrote: Hello everyone, hi Shannon and Jamie!
We recently played a Sofar Sound show in our hometown and our friends wanted to hear about house concerts and now we have some people who are interested in hosting a house concert themself.
One person owns a business and she was thinking of doing a concert at her business location which is a great, open space. But she is worried about insurance and what happens if something happens and what if people want to bring their own beers or two...
We have another person who is worried about their private home and what if people get drunk and drive home and have an accident etc.
What do you tell people if they worry about these type of situations? And how can we protect ourselves from being sued just because someone knocked over a vase or tripped over a carpet or....
Any tips on how you and other handle this would be wonderful.
Thank you for sharing all of your house concert wisdom with other musicians. It is greatly appreciated!
- Julia
Hey Julia! It's good to have you here, and thank you for the kind words. We appreciate them very much.
We've never done insurance once in our 7+ years doing many hundreds of house concerts. The kind of person who would sue someone because they did something stupid at a house concert would have to be ... well, a real asshole! And you can't live your life worrying about what the assholes will do. It's no way to live.
Regarding the nervous party host ... in the real world, people don't get special insurance when they have a gathering at their house. I mean, have you literally ever heard of someone doing that? Of course not. Because no one does that. Maybe like in Beverly Hills or something. What you do in the real world is, you host your party, and you watch your guests carefully because that's what a responsible party host does, and if someone's clearly too drunk to drive home you either take their keys away or, if they're belligerent about it, you call the cops on them. That's how humans should deal with each other. You don't buy insurance and leave people to do their worst - you get involved on a personal level and you look after one another's well-being.
The corollary to this is that if someone is worried about this sort of thing, they shouldn't host a house concert. It's bad energy for what should be an exercise in collaboration and community and trust.
The kind of parties where the tone is one of getting wasted aren't the kind of events you should playing at anyway. Nothing against them, we've just learned from hard-won experience that they make for crappy concerts with unfocused and resentful crowds. The focus of these gatherings should be on the art, not on the party.
There are definitely people in this world who have a paranoid worldview in which everything is a potential liability. My advice is to avoid those people. They're bad for your health.
Your mileage may vary - these are just my thoughts on the subject.
RE: Insurance - Loftän - 17 Mar 2018
Dear Jamie,
that is a wonderful and thoughtful answer. Thank you so much for this. I agree with a lot of what you wrote and I think we just haven’t found the right people yet...
Julia
RE: Insurance - jamie - 21 Mar 2018
(17 Mar 2018, 12:50 PM)Loftän Wrote: Dear Jamie,
that is a wonderful and thoughtful answer. Thank you so much for this. I agree with a lot of what you wrote and I think we just haven’t found the right people yet...
Julia
Thanks Julia. Definitely keep looking! You will find the right people eventually. It wasn't all smooth sailing for us at the beginning either.
