£16000 or £300?

[srw]

Musicians pay higher premiums because if they're killed or injured in a crash (that's their fault) then the insurer would be liable for the costs of any cancelled concerts.
However insurers don't seem to distinguish between local musicians and people like Eric Clapton.

Not true. Concert promoters will have their own cancellation insurance. I'm not a wordings expert, but liability is limited to people you injure or kill and property you damage, not to consequent loss to others.

Is that true? If you cause an accident and the victim is a musician, that would be true - your insurance would pay out on all costs caused to others by the accident, but comprehensive car insurance only covers damage to your vehicle, not to you.

(yes, I know musicians, actors etc have higher premiums, but I don't think that is the reason)

Edit: if you are a musician, it's more likely that Eric Clapton will be a passenger, so apparently that is part of the reason

Yes, that's part of it. If you kill or injure yourself, your motor insurance doesn't pay you a penny. If you kill or injure a passenger, your motor insurance will pay out, including for loss of earnings. Which in the case of an Eric Clapton could be rather expensive. Add to that the cliché that musicians tend to drive very late at night, and possibly tend to indulge more freely in mind-altering substances (legal and otherwise) than others and you get an expensive premium.

I suspect the musician in the OP made the rather naive decision to look on aggregator websites for insurance. If he'd simply looked online for a specialist broker, or asked the people he plays with, he could probably have found a much better price.

This is bang on. In South Asia, there is no insurance. Accidental damage would be discussed by the two parties and a settlement agreed.

Not strictly true. It's certainly the case that there are insurance companies operating in India (I don't know the rest of South Asia as well), and Professor Google tells me that motor insurance is as compulsory there as it is here. But it wouldn't surprise me to discover that a number of people ignore the law, and even if they have insurance don't use it to settle minor bumps.

 

[Accy cyclist]

There are 3 or 4 Bradford postcodes which regularly appear in the top (national) hotspots for accident claims. Incidentally, these also have a high number of uninsured drivers.

The same in parts of Blackburn Lancs.