DJ Booking Contracts Explained: Deposits, Riders, Radius

Most DJ bookings in electronic music are still agreed in a chat window. A promoter sends a date, you send a fee, someone replies with a thumbs up, and that is the entire agreement. It works fine until the night it doesn't: the venue changes hands, the festival moves your stage, or the show is cancelled six weeks out and nobody can say who keeps the deposit. Live music is one of the last parts of this business where the money is genuinely at risk, and the paperwork in dance music is thinner than in almost any other live sector. That gap is why some DJs get paid reliably and others chase invoices for months.

Deal memo or contract: what are you actually signing?

Two documents circulate in booking, and they do different jobs. The deal memo is one page and confirms the commercial core: artist name as billed, date, venue and city, set length and slot, fee and currency, deposit, who pays for travel and accommodation, and billing position. The long-form agreement adds the legal machinery — cancellation, force majeure, exclusivity, liability, governing law.

For a normal club show the deal memo is often all that exists, and that is usually acceptable: in most jurisdictions a written exchange containing the essential terms is binding, so an email chain counts. What actually decides whether you get paid is a detail people skip — the memo has to name the paying entity, not just a person. "Booked by Tom" is worthless when Tom promotes under a company that dissolves in January. Ask for the registered company name and address, and make it the counterparty. Contracts are one of the few places in this scene where paperwork carries as much weight as music, which is equally true of ghost production deals and what they say about credit.

How much deposit should a DJ ask for?

The working standard is 25 to 50 percent of the fee to lock the date, with the balance due on the night or by transfer within an agreed number of days. The deposit is not a courtesy: it converts an intention into a commitment, and it is the most effective filter there is against promoters still hoping ticket sales will fund your fee.

Before a deposit there are holds. A first hold means the promoter has priority on that date; a second hold sits behind it. If the second-hold promoter is ready to confirm, they can challenge, and the first hold must confirm within a short window or release the date. Holds are not bookings and cost nobody anything — only money changes that. The discipline is the same from the other side of the table, where the deposit is one of the first budget lines in starting a club night.

For international shows, insist the balance arrives by transfer before travel, or at minimum in cash at the venue before you play rather than after. If an agent is involved the money flows promoter to agency to artist, and the agency deducts its commission — typically 10 to 20 percent of the gross — on the way through. That is normal. An agency charging you a fee to be represented is not.

What happens if the promoter cancels?

This is the clause worth reading twice, because the default is silence and silence favours whoever holds the money. A workable cancellation ladder is tied to timing: outside 30 days the booker forfeits the deposit; inside 30 days the full fee is owed, because a date that close cannot realistically be refilled. Mirror it for your own side — if you cancel, you offer an approved replacement or return the deposit.

Then there is force majeure, which after 2020 appears in nearly every agreement and is routinely misread as a free exit. It is not. In March 2022 a federal judge in Nevada ordered FP Holdings, owner of the Palms resort that housed the club KAOS, to pay Kaskade close to eight million dollars over his cancelled residency. The club had already shut in late 2019, and when the operator blamed the pandemic for the 2020 dates the judge found shows could have been staged before the shutdown order and that it had never analysed alternatives. The lesson is narrower than the headline: the clause protects whoever invokes it only for the events it actually describes. Write it to cover genuine impossibility — government order, venue closure, travel shutdown — and not "ticket sales were disappointing". Cancellation risk is also why promoters budget for event insurance and security.

What is a radius clause, and should you sign one?

A radius clause stops you performing within a defined distance of an event for a defined period before and after it. Large festivals commonly work with terms around 90 miles and 90 days, and US electronic promoters have historically pushed far more aggressive versions — litigation over the Chicago promoter React Presents, decided in a Michigan federal court in 2017, concerned clauses reaching up to 500 miles for 60, 90 or 120 days either side of an event.

The logic is defensible: the promoter is paying for a draw, and a cheaper show down the road two weeks earlier undercuts it. The problem is that a wide clause signed casually can freeze a quarter of your calendar, and if the radius covers your home city it takes your residency with it. Negotiate rather than refuse — shorten the window, especially on the post-event side, carve out shows already confirmed at signing, exclude unadvertised appearances and afterparties, and check whether the clause survives cancellation. If the festival drops you, it should not still be blocking your bookings.

The rider: what belongs in it, and what makes you look green

A rider is a specification, not a status symbol. Keep the technical rider to what you need to do the job: playback units and mixer with acceptable equivalents named, a booth monitor with its own level control, booth size and a stable surface, the number of power sockets, and your USB or laptop policy. Naming equivalents matters — a rider demanding one exact mixer with no alternative gets quietly ignored by a club that owns a different one, and you find out at soundcheck.

The hospitality rider covers travel, accommodation, ground transport, guest list numbers, dressing room access, water and food. Keep it proportionate to the fee: a club at the lower end of the market will accept a hotel and a taxi, not a list of spirits. The fastest way to look inexperienced is a rider longer than the contract.

Travel, buyouts and the tax nobody budgets for

Two words decide whether the number in your contract is the number in your account. A buyout is a fixed cash payment instead of a provided item: you take an amount and book your own hotel or meals. Convenient, and a cost transfer — price it accordingly.

The bigger surprise is withholding tax. Most countries tax performances where they happen and make the promoter deduct it at source. The United States withholds 30 percent from non-resident performers unless a treaty or a central withholding agreement reduces the rate. The United Kingdom applies a 20 percent basic rate through HMRC's Foreign Entertainers Unit once a payer's total payments to you in a tax year exceed the personal allowance, with a route to apply for a lower deduction where touring costs make the final liability smaller. Germany deducts 15 percent plus the solidarity surcharge under section 50a of the income tax act, with no deduction where earnings per performance do not exceed 250 euros. None of this is optional for the promoter, who is on the hook if they fail to withhold.

So state it explicitly. Is the fee gross, meaning the deduction comes out of your number, or net, meaning the promoter grosses it up? Both are normal; only the ambiguity is expensive. And ask for the withholding certificate afterwards — without it you cannot credit the tax at home, and you have paid twice.

The short version

You do not need a lawyer for a 400 euro club booking. You need six lines: who is paying, how much, in what currency, when the deposit lands, what happens if it is cancelled, and whether the fee is before or after tax. Everything above hangs off those six. Get them in writing every time, and the arguments that end most DJ friendships with promoters never start.