Why is it so hard for non-EU touring artists to accept payments in Europe?

When we first started researching payments for artists, we assumed the problem had already been solved.

After all, card payments are everywhere. Coffee shops, market stalls, food trucks and taxis can all accept a contactless payment in seconds. Surely an artist selling a t-shirt after a show should be able to do the same thing.

Instead, we discovered an industry running on workarounds.

Artists borrow payment terminals from friends. They borrow them from venues. They rent them through merch companies. They print QR codes. They accept cash. Sometimes they simply lose sales because a fan wants to pay by card and there is no practical way to make it happen.

At first glance, this makes very little sense. Why wouldn't artists simply use the same payment solutions as everyone else?

The answer is that most payment systems are designed for businesses operating within the countries they serve. A local shop has a local address, a local bank account, a local legal entity, and owners who live and work in that market. For artists touring Europe from outside the European Union, those assumptions often break down. While many operate professional businesses in their home countries, they may not have a European entity, European residency, or a banking relationship within the EU. As a result, they can find themselves locked out of financial services that local businesses take for granted, despite being legitimate businesses with legitimate customers standing in front of them ready to buy merchandise.

The challenge is not accepting a payment. Modern technology solved that years ago.

The challenge is understanding who is receiving the money, where they are located, whether they are permitted to receive those funds, and ensuring the entire process complies with regulations designed to prevent fraud, financial crime and money laundering. These regulations exist for good reasons, but touring artists often find themselves caught in systems that were never designed with their reality in mind.

This helps explain why so many workarounds exist. What appears to be a simple solution on the surface can quickly become complicated underneath. Collecting money on behalf of someone else, paying it out later, lending payment terminals between businesses, processing payments through another organisation's account, or operating across borders can all create legal, compliance or contractual issues depending on how the arrangement is structured.

What surprised us most during our research was not that artists were using workarounds. It was that so many talented and professional people had no better option available. The people we spoke to were not trying to bypass the rules. They were trying to navigate a genuinely difficult regulatory environment while getting on with the job of touring, performing and connecting with fans.

The real problem is not payments.

The real problem is that artists need a reliable, compliant and practical way to sell merchandise wherever their audience happens to be. Whether they are playing a local club, supporting another band for three nights, or touring across multiple countries, they need something that works without forcing them to become experts in payment infrastructure, compliance, or financial regulation.

That is why ZAZZpay exists.

We built ZAZZpay to remove the friction between artists and their fans by making merchandise sales simple, compliant and accessible across Europe. Our goal is not just to process transactions, but to give touring artists the confidence that they can sell wherever they perform, get paid reliably, and focus their energy on the music rather than the complexity behind the payment.