In some countries, if you hire artists for an event, you are responsible for withholding taxes that are due on the artist’s income. Regular employment often works like this too. Taxes that are withheld at the source are called withholding taxes.

For example if I were to host an artist from the UK for an event here in Germany, I would have to deduct ~15% of their pay and pay it directly to the German tax authority. Basically in the same way that if I hired an employee in Germany I would have to estimate the income tax on their salary and withhold it too.

You can’t generally get these taxes back because they are normal taxes that are just paid in a specific way. But foreign artists from a country that both taxes foreign income and has some kind of double taxation agreement with the country they’re performing in would be able to get some of their tax payments back. There may be other reasons too, I’m not familiar with regulations regarding artists.

For normal employees it’s not uncommon either for the final tax to be different from what was withheld and then the difference is paid/reimbursed when they file their taxes.

hello,

Sony doesn’t book tours. they are a label.

I genuinely believe though that artists should be optimizing for in person revenue and cheap or free music downloads as marketing.