When to Sue

You show up at a gig you booked 5 months before. You've spent about ten hours of time promoting this gig, posting it to all your social media pages, designing and printing out a  poster and mailing it to the venue and having your street team plaster paper around town, creating a Facebook event and inviting everyone on the planet whose name and page you could creep up. You practiced, you wrote up your setlist, you packed the truck, you drove over an hour to get there. 

But when you arrive you notice your posters aren't up. The hostess winkles her nose in confusion and says, No, we're not having a band tonight...  Finally the manager comes out and says, Oh, I thought I emailed you. We've got a private party here tonight, guys, sorry. Shoot me an email, we'll do it some other time. 

Or, in a move similar to what just happened to me, you show up and find out the venue went out of business the night before--after having booked you to play a once a month slot for a year.

Fact is, you could legally sue these venues, and in a perfect world, that would probably be the appropriate way to ensure a just solution. Assuming the dollar amounts involved were under several thousands of dollars, depending on your jurisdiction, you could even sue in small claims court, which is inexpensive and easy to do without a lawyer. 

You could probably sue, successfully, on two legal theories that go hand-in-hand. One is that you had a contract with the venue, that is, a meeting of the minds and agreement that you would play on a certain date for X amount of time, and the venue would provide... whatever the venue was going to provide. Space to play, listing in the paper, a paycheck, a tip jar, a free dish of ice cream. As long as whatever the venue was going to provide had value--even an uncertain value, like a tip jar--then this was an agreement to perform a service for a certain value, which means it was a contract. 

The other similar theory is that you reasonably acted in reliance on the venue's representations. You expended time and money, and declared yourself unavailable for other potentially lucrative engagements, because the venue promised you could play there that night. 

Either way, you've been wronged and it cost you time, money and opportunity, and it is legally appropriate for the venue, as the wrongdoer, to have to compensate you for that. 

So what's the downside? In the case of the venue that remains open, the downside is you'll never play there again if you sue them. But that might not be a bad thing. In the case of the closed venue, well, you weren't going to be playing there anyway. But in a community where restaurant and club owners know each other, socialize together, or where chains of bars are owned by the same management company, you may also find yourself locked out of a larger number of potential venues--blacklisted by the management. 

Ethically, this is just plain wrong. You got screwed over and, as a business, should be able, in a business-like manner, to place an honest claim for your compensation before the courts. And you might just want to do that. Just be aware that it runs a risk of retaliation or being shut out of other things, and that might make the tough life of booking gigs even tougher. You'll have to weigh the pros and cons and make that decision for yourself.  Talk to other bands, for starters -- if this venue has a bad rep for continually screwing bands over, you may just want to go ahead and file for compensation under the theory that someone needs to make them realize they can't keep getting away with it.

Rock on your rights--you don't necessarily have to let them walk all over you.