With a week to go before this year’s SXSW, CEO and co-founder Roland Swenson is defending the festival against a backlash over immigration language in its artist contracts. The controversy started on Thursday, when Told Slant’s Felix Walworth publicly called off a planned performance, citing a clause that allows SXSW to “notify the appropriate U.S. immigration authorities” if they “or their representatives have acted in ways that adversely affect the viability of their official SXSW showcase.” After Walworth’s announcement, an open letter condemning the contract provision drew signatures from artists including Downtown Boys, PWR BTTM, Priests, and Sheer Mag.
In response, Swenson issued a statement noting SXSW has spoken out against President Trump’s travel ban and “is working hard to build a coalition of attorneys to assist artists with issues at U.S. ports of entry during the event.” Today, SXSW shared a new statement saying the festival “opposes discrimination of any kind” and “will be reviewing and amending” the contract clause “for 2018 and beyond.” Swenson spoke with Pitchfork over the phone on Friday afternoon about the criticism, the rationale behind the contract language, and what might change next year.
Dozens of artists have signed an open letter calling on SXSW to remove the immigration language and publicly apologize. What’s your response to those artists?
Roland Swenson: If you take any contract and just pull out a few clauses, it always seems a lot worse than it is when you read it all together in one long thing. The reason we have those clauses is, one, we need the artists to know the conditions of their visa. It’s really serious business. To get their attention we have some very stern wording there.
But at the same time, it’s also so that the Customs and Border Patrol people know that we’re really serious about visa issues. And we’re trying to make sure that the artists that come in follow the rules. One of the reasons we do that is, we’ve had artists who attended in the past and gone and done shows in L.A. and New York and other places. And then the following year, when they tried to get into the country they were turned away, because that stuff was noted when they exited back to their home country.
It’s a really serious piece of what we do to get these acts, who are not famous in America. So we have this way of getting them in that relies on some very important conditions. One of them being that they’re not being paid in cash, and then the other one being that they’re only going to play these shows that they’re officially invited to at SXSW.
The main concern I’m hearing from some in the music community seems to be that SXSW is using artists’ immigration status to discourage them from playing unofficial shows. Is there anything else you would say to address those worries?
We’re just telling them that these are the conditions of your visa and you need to follow them. We take that stuff really seriously and so do the immigration people. We’re looking out for all the bands that come in this way. It really wouldn’t take that many people being detained for violating their visa to where it would ruin it for everybody.
Is this industry-standard language used by other festivals, or is this SXSW-specific?
Most other festivals aren’t operating in the same way that we are. Typically, they’re booking major bands who are on tour and have a work visa and are free to play whatever shows they want to play. What other festivals do wouldn’t really be applicable to us.
We didn’t write this language. One of our lawyers did. We’ve been using it since at least 2013, and so far it’s all worked out pretty well. We’ve never turned somebody into ICE or anything like that. In our agreement, it’s saying these are the things that could happen to you if you don’t follow the terms of your visa. It’s not stuff that we’re going to do to them. It’s stuff that Immigration would do to them.
You’ve said the clause would only be invoked “if somebody did something really horrific, like disobey rules about pyrotechnics, starting a brawl, or if they killed somebody.” Why not make the clause more specific or straightforward?
We’re trying to pack a lot of information into a one- or two-page contract that people can follow who aren’t attorneys. Is this a perfectly written agreement? No. Could it be better? Yes. Will it be better? Yes. Have we done any of these things that we say can happen? No.
You’ve said this isn’t perfect, and you’ve previously said you’d consider revising this language. How would you want to revise it?
Our event starts next week. We know we have a problem here. We’re not sure exactly how we’re going to fix it, but we know we’re going to be working on it. At this point, these agreements have already been sent out, and people are going to use them to get their visas into the states. So for us to cancel them all to make this change is just not practical.
We’re going to make it through this year with things the way they are, and then we’ll go back through and look at it with the eyes of a person who is living in the world of Donald Trump. Which was not the case when we sent this out back in September.
It looks like the person that posted it, they got it just the other day. Do you know why the timing was like that?
It was a last-minute booking. This was part of our confusion. He had only gotten the invite letter. Not the actual contract. He contacted us saying, well, I don’t really like this, I’m going to drop out. And we said, well, OK. And then the next thing we know, it’s tweeted out. I wish that somebody had spent more time explaining the agreement and how it works and why it is the way it is. But it was somebody relatively new [at SXSW] that fielded this.
You said you feel this is partly being done out of a desire for publicity. Do you still believe that?
Any time you send out a tweet attacking SXSW, and that happens a lot, part of it is wanting to get your name out there.
As you said, we’re in the era of Trump. Do you see why people are upset? Is there anything else you can try to do to address that?
We just sent out another statement on it. After a while people are going to have to either accept that what we’re saying is sincere or continue to call us fascists. The context of this is that we really found a way to do this pretty amazing thing, which is to bring these hundreds of acts from outside the country, who for the most part nobody’s heard of them, and put them in a music festival and let them get exposure to people in the industry that can help them to achieve their goals. If there’s no other reason for people to forgive us, it’s because we’ve been able to do that for thousands and thousands of bands.