Musical America Blogs

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.    Dear Law and Disorder: Every time someone sends us a contract, its always a lengthy document with lots of legalese that no one understands. Is there anything wrong with having a simple, one page agreement that everyone can easily understand and will sign? A lot of people mistake “legalese” […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq. Dear Law and Disorder: Someone recently told me that there was a new form for U.S. visa petitions for artists. Is this true? If so, when do I have to start using it? Late last year, U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services (USCIS) released a revised version of Form I-129—the form […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.    Dear Law and Disorder: Our organization has engaged a foreign musician whose European agent is balking at the artist having to obtain an O-1 visa that we know he needs. We want to do this right, so I’m getting my ducks in line to tell him no and part […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq. Dear Law and Disorder: We are a dance company who is going to perform in March in the United States. We gave the list of names for Visa purposes last September to the venue. Now we have some changes, we have to replace two technicians who are essential for the […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.    Dear Law and Disorder: We have arranged for one of our foreign groups to perform a showcase at the upcoming APAP conference in New York. Will they need artist visas? Obviously, we’d like to avoid that time and expense. The artists are all from Europe and could enter as […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq. Dear Law and Disorder: I had a really interesting conversation with a consular officer at a U.S. consulate where we were having one of our groups apply for P visas. Our group has toured the U.S. many times and the officer mentioned that P class petitioners do not need to […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.     We booked a tour for a folk/rock group that will be touring the US for the first time. It took a lot longer to get their visas approved because US Immigration kept asking for unreasonable things like background information on venues and festivals and even made us get […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.    Dear Law and Disorder: We obtained a three year O-1 visa for one of our artists. We are the artist’s agent and served as his petitioner. A large venue wants to book the artist, but they are insisting that, according to their finance department, they cannot pay us as […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq. Dear Law and Disorder: We filed visa petitions for O-1 and an O-2 visas. USCIS is asking for a contract between each of the O-2s and either the petitioner or the employers. This has never been an issue before and we’ve been doing this for 20 years. They are also […]

By Brian Taylor Goldstein, Esq.    Dear Law and Disorder: A longtime friend who is also a very successful artist who I greatly respect, asked me to do a project with him. He sent me a contract, but it doesn’t cover things like when and how I get paid. I want to mark up the […]