Are You a Foreign Artist? You Are Officially Not Wanted Here.

Part II in a series

Image in public domain

(In Part I of this series, I took on the Grammys, and by extension the American music establishment, for their willful refusal to give proper respect to music from other shores and their rank hypocrisy in pretending they do. But this is worse than cultural bigotry — it is actually reflected in official government policy. Read on…)

Have you ever traveled in Europe? Did you notice the huge numbers of street performers in the major cities? Did you talk to any of them? (It’s easy because they all speak English.) You find Czech musicians in Brussels, Peruvians in Paris, Americans in Berlin… Some of them are really good at what they do. And most of them don’t need a visa to do it.

In general, they only need local work permits issued by the city where they hang out and perform. You can get one in a day.

How many street performers are there in American cities? I have gone entire days in New York, Chicago, and San Francisco without seeing any. If you do encounter them, they are mostly Americans.

There is a reason for this: unless you are American, working as a musician in the U.S. requires a special kind of visa, and it is very difficult to get.

The primary type of visa for performing artists, the P1, requires that you produce references from top people in the music industry, press clippings showing you are a star and other documentation that you are a Very Important Artist.

Other tiers of performing arts visas require proof of formal employment or testimonials from American music organizations or academic institutions that you are here as part of an important “cultural exchange.”

Artists from Abroad is an official organization that supports U.S. promoters trying to bring foreign acts over to perform.

This is from their website:

“Foreign guest artists normally must obtain one of the following:

O-1B classification for aliens of extraordinary ability in the arts;

O-2 classification for personnel accompanying an O-1B alien;

P-1B classification for internationally renowned performing groups and essential support personnel; and, for individual foreign artists performing as a member of a U.S.-based internationally renowned performing group;

P-2 classification for reciprocal exchange program;

P-3 classification for culturally unique performers or groups, teachers, and coaches”

In reality, meeting any of these criteria can mean a year of gathering references, assembling programs and brochures from previous concerts, soliciting testimonials, collecting old press coverage, and the like. If you have made significant money from your music, you must provide notarized copies of your tax returns and proof of gate receipts. It’s hard to escape the impression that DHS considers foreign singers as not too different from suspected terrorists.

One way to get around some of this is to work for free. The Gat Brothers did exactly that in 2016, when they made their only appearance in the U.S.

If you’ve never heard of them, here’s a clip of them busking in Jerusalem:

After this and other clips went viral, they became international stars and toured Europe several times, performing in serious concert venues. They only made it to the U.S. when they were invited and sponsored by a Jewish cultural heritage organization, and the tickets were given away for free. How many people can do that?

A good amateur musician who just wants to finance a backpacking tour across the U.S. by busking is out of luck. Got your F1 or J1 Student visa? Too bad. Performing for quarters is illegal and can get you deported. Of course, buskers are small fry, so more often, you’ll just be warned to cease during your visit and banned from returning to the U.S. once you return home.

If you had hopes of becoming a U.S. resident one day, you can kiss those goodbye — the black mark stays on your record forever. P3 visa? You’ll never recoup the cost of getting it in the first place — the legal fees alone can run over $1000, on top of the actual application fee — and besides, it will take you at least half a year to get it approved, once you have assembled the supporting documentation.

As though these hurdles are not enough, the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services have just announced a three-fold increase in the actual fees for P and O visas. At more than $1600 per person, before legal and agency fees, this can amount to more than $20,000 for the average rock band and their key support personnel. The ancillary costs can be several multiples of that. It is enough to make touring a losing proposition for all but the most established bands. It is curious that this came on the heels of the pandemic, which had already screwed up cross-border touring for over two years.

So, why is it like this? The truth is, these rules are not in place to nab scruffy students busking for spare change. The buskers are just collateral damage. The rules are there to protect the American entertainment industry and its roster of performers and studios from foreign competition. China and Iran are the only other major economies that impose such arbitrary and punitive barriers to foreign artists. A few smaller countries do so, and of course, there is North Korea, which takes weird to a whole new level.

China is motivated by paranoia about dangerous political content and threats to the regime. It says something about how insecure they are that they find pop concerts and rom-coms so threatening, but hey, it is what it is. And, as we know, the Iranians have a major bug up their asses regarding religious purity. Heck, they murdered a young woman for showing her hair in public, so how can we expect them to tolerate some trashy singer twerking in front of a crowd?

The U.S. restrictions on foreign artists are, if anything, harder to justify. There is not even a twisted social logic to it. We are just protecting our entertainment industry from competition. The rules apply to stage performances, movies, and live and recorded performances of all kinds, not just music.

Here is another example of what we are missing: Fatoumata Diawara is a Malian singer, social activist, and global superstar. She cracked the U.S. in 2013 when she was invited to perform at the Clinton Global Initiative annual gathering. I think she’s fantastic, but should it take this kind of star power to get in the gates here? What about emerging artists?

The restrictions on visiting artists and foreign music are not an accident. They were largely put in place because of lobbying by the Hollywood studios and the big U.S. record labels. Their lobbyists make the lobbyists for our agricultural and manufacturing industries look like amateurs. Where music is concerned, the only reason there are cracks in the wall today is youtube.

Not everyone in the American music world supports these policies. Smaller promoters, companies that work with foreign acts, and many U.S. artists who want to collaborate with people from other countries are against the visa restrictions in general and have spoken out against the new fee hikes.

On this issue, the industry is split between a handful of big corporations (I count some of the big stars as corporations) and everyone else. Based on my reading of the political press around this issue, the small fry are being drowned out.

The internet and streaming were supposed to open things up. It hasn’t worked out so well. The major paid streaming services have hard choices to make about hosting foreign content. They often block the monetization of content to avoid having to collect withholding taxes from the artists. Without monetization, where is the incentive to host the content in the first place?

Spotify and Netflix have very different catalogues if you access them from the UK or Germany vs. when you access them in the U.S. Even YouTube isn’t immune — a lot of foreign content is blocked in the U.S. and, increasingly, in a game of tit-for-tat, vice-versa.

This situation has consequences beyond the simple unfairness to foreign artists. It is unfair to the American music listener. As we know from other fields, a lack of competition leads to a lack of innovation. The U.S. music industry is living proof.

Today's top stars make music that sounds largely the same, plumbs the same themes (mostly their own self-absorption), and is catchy but not much more. One reason is that most of the songs are written by the same handful of professional songwriters (more on that in Part III). The truly innovative pop, soul, and rock artists did their best work decades ago, as you will see if you look at the list of headliners at major music festivals.

Hip-hop was the most important American music innovation in the past 40 years. And hip-hop is the exception that proves the rule: All major labels refused to work with rap artists, so they had to start their own labels.

I’m not a hip-hop fan, but I greatly respect what they had to do to break through against the industry’s resistance. They should not have had to fight so hard. Of course, now that they have become the dominant style of popular music here, they too benefit from our protectionist laws-at least the big names do.

Hip-hop is blowing up everywhere, and it’s taking some surprising turns:

Is she serious? Is this a social critique? I leave you to judge. But it’s very well done. As I said, I’m not a fan of hip-hop in general, but I’d go see this.

In Part III, I will look more closely at the corporatization of songwriting and how taxes are used to discourage foreign artists from tackling our market, even if they can get through the visa gauntlet. Stay tuned!

Sources:

U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services https://www.uscis.gov/working-in-the-united-states

Jewish Insights, August 2016 https://www.thejewishinsights.com/wp/sheya-mendlowitz-brings-gat-brothers-america/

Artists from Abroad website https://www.artistsfromabroad.org/immigration-procedures/

Private conversations with concert promoters

Billboard Pro, March 2023 https://www.billboard.com/pro/us-visa-fee-prike-increase-touring-artists-protest/

Nathaniel Rich “Hit Charade,” The Atlantic, 2015