Artist Booking in Seattle

Artist Booking Market Notes for Seattle

Direct artist booking in Seattle means routing a touring act — Punjabi, Bollywood, South Asian, or English-market — to either a public ticketed show or a private/corporate engagement. The biggest annual flows through Seattle are Punjabi tours (Diljit Dosanjh, Karan Aujla, AP Dhillon, Shubh have all played Climate Pledge Arena or WaMu Theater since the 2021 PNW expansion), Bollywood concert tours (Arijit Singh, Sonu Nigam, Atif Aslam routings hit Seattle when they include a West Coast leg), and growing Telugu/Tamil playback-singer tour activity driven by the Eastside tech-Indian audience. Seattle is the natural northernmost stop on the West Coast leg — San Francisco Bay Area to Los Angeles to Seattle — and is increasingly packaged with a Vancouver BC date the same week, since the cross-border drive is only 3 hours and the Surrey BC SA community overlaps culturally and through family ties with the Kent / Renton Seattle Punjabi base. That cross-border feeder means private Seattle bookings can sometimes piggyback on a tour that's already routed to play Vancouver, materially reducing the artist-fee floor. Visa, immigration, and US withholding-tax handling are core to the work: most Punjabi and Bollywood touring acts enter on a P-2 visa (reciprocal artist exchange under the AFM agreement) or O-1 visa (extraordinary ability), with 60-90 day USCIS filing lead time. Performer compensation is subject to a default 30% non-resident withholding tax under IRC §1441/1442, but this can be reduced to 0-15% by filing a Central Withholding Agreement (CWA) with the IRS in advance, or by claiming relief under Article 18 of the US-India tax treaty for qualifying artist income. Washington's no-state-income-tax status (only WA capital-gains tax applies to investment income, not artist appearance fees) is a minor tax-planning advantage for routings that overnight in Seattle vs. high-tax West Coast neighbours. Fee bands we see in Seattle: rising touring acts (300k-1M monthly listeners), $5,000-$28,000 private; established mid-tier (1M-5M listeners), $28,000-$110,000; top-tier headliners (Diljit, Karan Aujla, Arijit Singh tier), $180,000-$1,000,000+ private, public tour fees quoted by promoter share.

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