US Immigration Office Unable To Understand Internet Popularity
from the wait,-so-you-became-popular-where? dept
In the last few years, we've heard numerous stories of musicians rocketing to stardom, thanks to the internet. In fact, some bands really are coming out of nowhere, with tons of internet support worldwide, even if the band has only been together a short while. Apparently, that's a huge problem for foreign bands looking to tour the US, as the type of visa that US immigration grants to touring musicians requires that those musicians can show that they are "internationally recognized" for a "sustained and substantial" period of time. Unfortunately for internet superstar musicians, US immigration doesn't seem to recognize internet popularity as being "internationally recognized" and the quick rise to popularity hurts on the "sustained and substantial" period of time analysis. The folks in immigration respond that they will consider internet popularity, but since they have no idea if the popularity is real or manufactured, the band needs to prove that the sites that talk about the musicians are popular themselves, first. Even if that's the case, it seems that a few well known UK acts are having an awful lot of trouble getting to the US. Perhaps they should simply show the ticket sales from sold out clubs in the US waiting for them (the article notes that clubs have had to cancel sold-out shows after the musicians were unable to make it to the US). Either way, it's yet another example of how the internet is making old processes obsolete.Thank you for reading this Techdirt post. With so many things competing for everyone’s attention these days, we really appreciate you giving us your time. We work hard every day to put quality content out there for our community.
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Filed Under: immigration, internet, musicians, popularity, uk
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Re:
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And really, who cares?
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Internet popularity
What is popular on the Internet ? Maybe 500,000 know who you are ? If you air once on MTV, then 5,000,000 know who you are .
Anyway, I think
"internationally recognized" for a "sustained and substantial" period of time
means something completely different from "We got 100,000 fans" and "We have been hot for the last 6 months".
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Re:
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More reasons
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ICE INS IRS
"Your papers please..."
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Internet popularity? Look how that turned out for Howard Dean.
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M'kay? I'm sorry, but yeah.... We full up.
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I don't know about recently, but back then the INS basically rubber-stamped the USAian musician unions' decisions, which often looked (at least from the outside, to poor unsophisticated music fans like me) as being not-infrequently influenced by a desire to avoid competition for US bands...
The Kinks - one of the important English Invasion bands, were banned for some years from the US because an AFM rep disapproved of their "unprofessional conduct" backstage at a NYC gig. (Rumour hath it that the said "unprofessional behaviour" included a debagging-and-tossing-pants-out-the-window epsisode in response to s demand for perfromance dues...)
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Not making a living
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