Fulfilling the hospitality rider: Working practices and issues in a tour’s supply chain

The hospitality rider, which details musicians’ and road crews’ food, drink, and personal requirements, is an important aspect to understanding how a concert happens and the working lives of support personnel on tour. If concerts are cultural commodities (Brennan and Webster 2011, 1), then a central part of touring is its supply chain. The rider is a means to supply the essentials that maintain workers on tour. This necessary and usually mundane document has been presented in popular culture as a signifier of musicians’ privilege and outrageous demands. However, this chapter suggests that the rider's contents and function are more usefully described as practical and specific. Drawing on interviews and participant observation, it discusses the issues and power dynamics involved in procuring a tour's supplies. This chapter highlights the “swift trust” (Meyerson, Weick, and Kramer 1996) and daily remaking of relations between the touring party and a venue's local crew and explores contrasting attitudes toward the rider and how it becomes a space of conflict, resistance, or negotiation as relative to workers’ positions and interests. More broadly, it advances knowledge about touring and live music by analyzing taken-for-granted working practices occurring behind the scenes (see Behr et al. 2016, 14).