Late payments lead to discord at US music festivals

Music festivals, usually held in the summer, are a way for people to experience live music and to experience new trends. These events are usually seen as a weekend to have a good time, and their organisers are committed to ensuring festival goers leave it with nothing but good things to say about their experience.

But in the case of one such event, some vendors are kicking up a fuss about the delays in payments by festival organisers. In fact, the Willamette Country Music Festival may be cancelled next year due to late payments to its vendors for this year’s event.

A number of suppliers have yet to be paid two months after the event was last held, and the festival’s debts extend to the local sheriff’s department, which is owed US$78,000. The Linn County Sheriff Office has said they will not provide security to future events.

Vendors at the festival kept the proceeds of their cash sales but were required to use a company-owned system for credit card and bracelet sales and were supposed to get their payments after the festival. According to a vendor, they are owed thousands of dollars each.

The vendors have filed fraud complaints to the Oregon Department of Justice.

The organiser of the music festival is WCMC, and is also in charge of Country Crossings Music Festival in Central Point, Oregon, and Mountain Home Country Music Festival in Idaho.

It seems WCMF is attracting late payment complaints. Some vendors say they were paid late, and some said they weren't paid at all for this year’s summer event. There are reports that many vendors were issued cheques that bounced.

This comes as the Country Crossings Music Festival’s top sponsor decided against sponsoring this year’s edition of the music festival. Bi-Mart, a retailer that operates across Oregon, Washington and Idaho, said it had decided not be a festival sponsor, leading to the festival removing “Bi-Mart” from its name and branding across social media.

A vendor at the festival told KDRV.com that the festival was "cashless", which means the organisers controlled the cash. It is more common for events to collect their portion of the sales from vendors at the end of an event. This means the vendors have to put up their expenses first, and most of them are due 80% of their gross sales. They say has been over 70 days since the festival ended and they still have not received their cut of the profits. Some vendors are considering a class action lawsuit.

It is not just country music festivals that are seeing late payments to vendors. A history of late payments caused the organisers of Loufest, a music festival in St Louis, Missouri, to cancel the event four days before it was supposed to begin. Loufest, which was supposed to feature former Led Zeppelin front man Robert Plant’s band, Modest Mouse, and Gary Clark Jr., was supposed to be held on the weekend of 8 and 9 September. Key contractors in charge of stage lighting, sound and additional musical instruments had decided to pull out of the festival, citing persistently delayed payments from the organizers.

A local company, Green2Go, provided electricity to the 2016 festival but has declined to work with the event again. Its owner said the organiser paid him late, forcing him to take out a loan to pay his employees. Another vendor who was to produce sound and lighting for the festival said the organiser failed to fulfil their contract, and that it had stepped back from the project.

But trumping the late payment disputes last year was Fyre Fest. It promised to be a luxury event that would be more exclusive than Coachella, but became the most controversial in the music festival industry. Held on an island in the Bahamas, it turned out to be a massive fraud that left 5,000 concert-goers stranded and resort owners and vendors unpaid. This led to lawsuits by the festival goers and an investigation by the FBI. The event organiser was recently sentenced to six years of prison.

Curiously enough, a vendor claimed to have been paid by the organiser of the Willamette Country Music Festival. The Harrisburg Booster Club sold tickets and delivered water to festival goers, and said they have been paid for their work. We wonder what this vendor did right compared to the rest.