Insurance For Musicians
Insurance is a necessary thing for you home, car, boat, and pretty much everything in life, including your life. Some individuals, in this case musicians, may be under the impression that their equipment is covered under their homeowners or renters insurance, or auto insurance if they are travelling. However, this impression is incorrect. This is why it is extremely important for touring musicians as well as any musician who has accumulated expensive equipment to look into insurance specifically created for musicians materials and their tours.
Types of Insurance
General Musician Insurance
This type of insurance is pretty general. You can pay a yearly fee that will cover a certain amount of money depending on how much you pay yearly. Currently, the most common price seen online is between $100 and $300 per year. This cost covers your equipment if it gets forgotten, stolen, damaged, or completely broken. You can purchase this insurance online or speak with an insurance broker about other options that are recommended.
Public Liability Insurance
Public Liability Insurance is for professionals who interact with the public. This type of insurance protects against claims of an injury or property damage from a third party. If your band or musical group is ever requested to pay damages for causing an injury or property damage, this type of insurance will cover these costs, as well as any associated legal or hospital fees. Currently, most small businesses will pay between$400 and $600 per year for $1 to $2 million dollar liability insurance, but prices can certainly be higher or lower depending on who you get this insurance through and what type of action you are performing.
Further Reasons Why You Need Insurance
Accidents happen
Things get lost, stolen, forgotten, or damaged all the time. This isn’t usually a big deal to most individuals, but say your entire tour van or bus gets robbed and all of your equipment has been stolen, it would be practically impossible to pay out of pocket to replace what you have lost. Accidents happen all the time so you need something to cover these accidents.
You may not be able to perform live without it
Many venues now have specific rules regarding who they will book for performances. It is now common for venues to require bands or musicians to have some type of public liability insurance. This is often required because venue owners do not want to have to foot a huge bill if something goes wrong at their venue, and most likely neither will you. If a crowd member gets hurt because you smash your guitar and a string flies loose, that could result in thousands of dollars in medical bills that will be put on you or the the venue owner, so having this insurance will save you from having to pay out of pocket or hurting your reputation with someone you performed for. Also, items within the venue could be fragile and your equipment itself if fragile as well, meaning that the public could break something depending on how lively the crowd is. Things like this can happen that are too pricey to fix, which means that having some type of public liability insurance will protect you from having to spend all your savings to make up for the damages.
Not as expensive as you may think
Although the insurance you may already have could be pretty pricey, for example your auto insurance, these two recommended insurance types for musicians are highly affordable as noted above. While being inexpensive they are also created to cover much more than you could ever expect from the insurance you already own, in regard to your musical possessions and endeavors.
Conclusion
In a career where your equipment is on the road just as much as you are, it is important to make sure that everything is insured because accidents do happen. Musicians should know and understand that your things for concerts and tours are not fully covered under your existing insurance, such as home or auto. These can cover some of the expenses you may encounter but will for sure not compensate for your entire loss, especially if multiple expensive instruments are stolen or broken. In stating this, any musician who can afford to have all this expensive equipment should set aside a budget to buy insurance. Nothing is worse than missing out on a show or gig because you lost or broke a piece of equipment and cannot afford to replace it. Overall insurance won’t break your budget but an accident or mishap certainly can.
Sources:
http://rockrevoltmagazine.com/band-aid-101-musical-instrument-gear-insurance/
https://www.musicproinsurance.com/pages/instrumentAndEquipment
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