A rider is the part of a performer’s contract that lists everything that must be waiting at the venue, from stage equipment and lighting to towels, bottled water and the exact contents of the dressing-room snack bowl. Fans adore the food requests; promoters spend far more time on the technical pages.
The most quoted rider line belongs to Van Halen, whose 1980s contracts asked for a bowl of M&M’s with every brown one removed. It sounds like pure rock-star whim, but David Lee Roth later explained it was a test. The clause was tucked among pages of demanding staging requirements, so a stray brown sweet told the band that the promoter had skimmed the contract and the rig deserved a careful second look. Roth retold the story in a video released alongside the band’s 2012 album. Fussiness, it turns out, can double as a quality-control system.