How Crackerjack holds your payment until the show is done

When an organiser accepts a booking on Crackerjack, the payment is taken immediately — but it doesn't go to the artist. It sits in escrow, held by Crackerjack, for the full length of the booking.

The artist can see that the funds have been secured against their booking the moment it's confirmed, which is what makes the booking real rather than a verbal agreement that either side could walk away from. But the payout itself only releases after the event has actually happened.

We take a 10% commission on artist bookings, and 5–7% on ticketed event sales. That isn't a listing fee — it's the cost of the guarantee: holding the funds, verifying both sides, and being the party either side can escalate to if something goes wrong before the payout is released.

It's also why we can't release funds early just because an organiser asks nicely, or hold them past the event just because someone changed their mind afterward. The rule is fixed on purpose — a payout that can be delayed by request is a payout an artist can't actually plan around.

Cancellations before the event are handled through the cancellation terms attached to the booking, which are visible before either side confirms — not decided after the fact. If a dispute comes up around whether the booking was fulfilled, that's resolved before payout, using whatever both sides can point to: the booking's agreed terms, messages on the platform, and confirmation of attendance.

The short version: nobody gets paid for a show that didn't happen, and nobody who performed goes unpaid because the other side changed their mind afterward. That's the whole point of routing the money through us instead of directly between two people who, before this booking, were strangers.