MLD News - Border Disorder

Intrepid correspondent Graham discusses an issue from the front lines of Canadian indie band touring: the current situation of US work visas.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:04):
From the Major Label Debut podcast network. This is MLD News.
I'm your host, Graham Wright, and today's top story. I
am utterly alone. That's right. It's the dog days of
summer and I'm here by myself. I thought I'd give
the other guys a break and just do a quick
little news hit, just all by myself. So if that's

(00:24):
okay with you, then then let's get into it. The
news today is a little bit of inside baseball. We're
all about pulling back the curtain here on Major Label Debut.
We're going to do a little curtain pulling today to wit.
I received in my email inbox this week a newsletter
from the company that Tokyo Police Club used to use
to acquire our American work visas. So, in a nutshell,

(00:49):
if you are a band and you're not from America
and you wish to perform professionally in America, if you
wish to make money in the United States, that's working
and they want you to have a work visa and
you got to jump through some hoops to get it.
There's a lot of forms to fill out. You have
to do a lot of not like proving that you matter,

(01:12):
but also kind of proving that you matter. You have
to really butter yourself up. You have to write all
these paragraphs about how great the band is and how
great each member is personally, and how great each crew
member is personally. You have to get letters from people
you've worked with and other bands. The bigger and more impressive,
the better that sort of say, hey, this band is legit.

(01:33):
They're a real band that people like, and so you
should let them come to America and make a few pennies.
Playing shows and not having a work visa is a
big deal. When Tokyo Police Club was first starting out,
there was a racket going around among Canadian bands where
the idea is that you would get a letter from
a complicit American producer, promoter, label person, anyone who worked

(01:58):
in the business, and the letter say, hey, this band
is coming to my studio in Chicago to make some demos.
They're not getting paid a cent. This is a free
speculative trip for this band. Please let them in. You
would take that letter and you would give it to
the border guard, and the border guard would let you in,

(02:19):
and then you'd go into a whole tour secretly, and
it seemed like a pretty good racket, aside from the
fact that you're lying to the face of an American
border official, which I've been told is not recommended. And
indeed they did eventually wise up and at least one band,
at least one band that I personally knew, was crossing
the border, and they handed in their letter, and the

(02:40):
border guard googled their names and up popped their band website,
and on the front page of their band website was
the complete American tour, which was due to start the
day after they were crossing, and the band got banned
from America, both the individual members for a certain period
of time and the band itself for a much longer
period of time, to the extent that it essentially killed

(03:01):
any possibility of them touring in the United States. And
I can tell you from experience that touring in the
United States for a certain kind of Canadian indie band
is the difference between being able to keep doing the
band or not. You know, Canada is geographically large, but
the number of places where you can play gigs, there's

(03:22):
not that many of them, whereas in the United States,
you could tour back and forth four or five times
without ever playing the same town and Meanwhile, you're still
hitting markets where one hundred five hundred one thousand people
will come out and see you play. So it's hugely
important to be able to tour there. And that means,
especially now that they got wise to the scam, you

(03:43):
have to have a work visa. The problem with that
is a it costs a lot of money. I looked
up what Tokyo Police Club paid for our last work
visas for the Farewell tour, and we got visas that
let the band and the crew work in America for
a year. We could have to for the entirety of
like from the day we got the visas to one

(04:03):
year from that day, but only as Tokyo Police Club.
I could not have gone and done a Graham Wright show.
None of the crew members could have gone and worked
for any other band or anyone else. Only the Tokyo
Police Club touring apparatus with those people could cross from
Canada into America and make money. Now for us, that's
the cost of doing business. You know, it was like

(04:24):
five grand to get the visa application done, and that's
the filing fees. That's how much you pay the company
that does it for you. That's there's a musician's union
fee you have to pay it's or whatever it's it's
like a paperwork, bureaucracy thing. It costs money. But then
if they don't process it in time, because it's getting
slower and slower, which I'll talk about in a second,

(04:44):
if they don't process it in time, you have the
opportunity to upgrade. That's right. The USA, even before the
current monetization of the American government, the USA had like
a premium fast lane for visa application, and if you
upgrade to premium processing, you seem to always get your

(05:06):
visa in time, and if you don't, it's not a
sure thing. On our last visa application, which we got
in so far ahead of time, we were prepared, we
were on top of things. But sure enough, the tours
getting closer, the tours getting closer, and we get an
email from the visa lawyer saying, hey, guys, wish I
had better news, But if we want to be sure
that we're going to have this visa, I think the

(05:27):
time has come to upgrade to premium processing. So, like
I said, it was like five g's US for the
original application. It's another fifty six hundred dollars US to
upgrade to premium processing. We kind of felt like, we
don't have a choice here. We don't want to be
canceling the first one, two, three, four. You don't know
how many shows you're going to have to can off
the top of the tour. We've had bands drop off

(05:48):
American tours because their visa didn't come through at the
last minute, and so all of a sudden, you're scrambling
to find new bands. So we sent the lawyers to
the fifty six hundred dollars, and then before they could
send it to the US government, they processed our vs US.
So it all worked out and we got our visas
and we got our premium processing money back. But the
reason I bring this up today, the news hook for
this whole spiel I'm doing, is that I'm still on

(06:11):
the email newsletter subscription list for the visa lawyers we used,
and they send out information about what's going on in
the world of visas, and these days that's quite a lot.
And the latest thing is saying, look, if you need
a p visa that's a performer visa in the next
six months, you got to apply for it. Now six

(06:31):
months is like the minimum amount of time we now
recommend you get your application totally finished, completed, submitted, paid,
So if you have a two or six months from tomorrow,
you better get that shit into today. That's if you're lucky.
They also say you got it definitely budget for premium
processing now. And indeed, apparently the department of the US

(06:55):
government that handles the visa stuff does not accept applications
more than one year in advance, but they are now
sometimes taking more than one year to process the applications.
So the whole thing seems to be teetering dangerously and
in danger of complete collapse. The prices are going up,
the wait times are going up, and all of that

(07:16):
means that in order to legally tour the United States
as a non American band, you kind of have to
be a pretty professional operation. You have to have your
tours booked seven eight months in advance. You have to
have the capital lying around to expend five thousand or
ten thousand American dollars to get work visas, to go

(07:36):
on a tour to hopefully earn the money back. If
you're a new band, you don't have that much money,
you don't have that much expertise, you don't have that
much lead time. When you're a brand new band and
things are happening for you, even if it's going really
well and you can expect money down the road, you're
not planning a year in advance. Because things are happening now,
they're not happening next year. And so the whole apparatus

(07:58):
that sort of enabled the version of touring that I
understand that I came up doing and that I think
most bands that I've ever known have always done, which is,
you know, you sort of like you put it a record,
you put out music, you tour to promote it. When
the tour goes well, you go back to those places
and you keep on laying the tracks. You know, ahead
of the train, that's all going away. If you're a
new band, you don't have the money to go work

(08:21):
in America for free. Basically you know you're going to
do the first two or three Tokyo Police Club US tours,
we lost money or maybe broke even on, but we thought,
you know, it's important to us to be able to
make it happen in the States, And luckily at the
time we were able, it was cheaper back then, and
YadA YadA YadA, we had a path obviously, and we
made it work. That path is getting narrower and narrower,

(08:42):
and it's getting accessible to less and less bands and artists.
And this is to say nothing of the other weird
stuff that seems to be going on with visas in
terms of like what pronouns they'll accept compared to birth
certificate hits and all that seemingly, you know, just horrible
dystopian shit that I don't know enough about the what's
written down and what's actually happening to comment on. But

(09:05):
it's getting really hostile to go to America as a band. Obviously,
it's getting kind of hostile to go to America for
a lot of reasons. But this is a podcast about
pulling back the curtain of the music industry, and so
I'll limit my scope to that. I think it's a
really fascinating thing that in this moment in time when
recorded music has become borderless, you know, you could live

(09:27):
in the most remote corner of the world and if
you have a decent Internet connection, you can make a
song and upload it to the Internet, and someone in
London or Rio or Paris or New York or Toronto
or wherever can hear it. That same day. As that
happens with music. As you know, geography seems to melt
away from relevance. Live music seems like maybe it's going

(09:49):
in the direction of becoming more and more regionally limited,
and that seems to me sad obviously. You know, for
every Canadian indie band that doesn't tour the States, an
American indie band will take those gigs. And there's no
shortage of bands these days, and there's no shortage of
bands that deserve to be seen. I guess that's the
whole point of trade protectionism. But you know, for me,

(10:13):
touring in the States was not just the thing that
made the band like a viable career for me and
for us, but it was also just like incredible, rewarding,
wonderful experience. You know, even twenty years ago when we
were starting, you know, there was lots of shit talking
of America, and I feel so grateful that I got
to spend so much time in America, driving on the

(10:36):
highways from venue to venue and stopping at gas stations
and stopping at restaurants and meeting all these people, because
it reminds you that a country is just you know,
a lot of people inside it and whatever the government's
up to and whatever the news is saying. The reality
on the ground is just like anywhere, there's just like
mixed up people trying their best most of the time.

(10:56):
And I really appreciated getting to know that. And I
think it's a real loss for everyone that it's getting
more and more difficult to do. This is not a
call to arms. I don't have the solution for this. Frankly,
not to be pessimistic, but it seems to me that
no one in any position to ever do anything about
this gives one iota of one shit about whether or

(11:19):
not indie bands can tour internationally. That's just like, there's
no money there to get kickbacks from. There's no fame
and influence there to matter. You know, you two is
never going to have a hard time getting a work visa,
but the next Tokyo Police Club is. And you know,
to me, that's a damn shame and also an excuse
to talk about how all this work visa stuff works

(11:42):
in the spirit of curtain pulling back and also in
the spirit of the fact that all of my knowledge
and understanding about how the music industry works is becoming
obsolete day by day now that I'm no longer actively
involved in it, so I felt like I could get
it out now and it would still make a little
bit of sense. So if you're an American and you're
wondering why all your favorite Canadian indie bands aren't touring

(12:03):
your way as often as they used to, it may
be because their visa didn't come through, or they simply
decided not to spend all that money on a visa
in the first place. Needless to say, we all hope
that things will change, and maybe someday someone will realize
that indie bands don't need to be subject to all
this paperwork. And I've said nothing about what it takes
to get your gear across the border and what it

(12:24):
takes to get your merch across the border, and these
things are not draconian difficulty level, but they suck and
their pains in the ass, and they cost money, and
they're all obstacles. And we're getting real close to the
bone in the touring world right now, especially for indie bands.
There's less and less money to be made, and you
can't do it for free forever, and so every obstacle

(12:45):
begins to look less and less surmountable to me. That
is news, and that is why I've covered it today
on this nearly fifteen minute monologue version of MLD News.
If you're still listening, wow, thank you so much. You know,
maybe you like these. If you want to hear more
stuff about music industry nuts and bolts and ones and zeros,
drop us a line. I'm always happy to blab into

(13:08):
a microphone uninterrupted, and that blabbing and Major Label Debut
in general is always produced by my dear friends John
Paul Bullock and Josh Hook. Guys, thank you so much
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(13:30):
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News this week. But of course Major Label Debut will

(13:50):
return as usual with more stories from the intersection of
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