I'm sure that you do not need to claim non-profit status in order to run a business that "tries" to make a profit, but that can document that it just barely breaks even. You can even show a loss pretty much any given year, and thereby reduce the taxes you owe based on your day-job income, or whatever other income you may have.

A small home-based business showing little or no profit ~ especially when new ~ is not going to raise any red flags with the IRS. Indeed, setting up such an enterprise as a justification for writing off much of your normal spending as "business expense" is a time-honored American tradition that is certainly well-known to the IRS, and they generally tolerate it.

Now, if you go on and on for years without ever becoming profitable, you will raise one of those red flags, resulting in an audit. I hesitate to suggest a firm figure, how many consecutive years you can get away with declaring losses. I do feel confident in suggesting that you pick a year, during your first 4-5 years of operation, when you can afford to show a modest business income on which you pay a little tax, and then go back to losing and break-even years for another period of time.

Disclaimer: All of the above presupposes, of course, that the figures you declare each year would be true. That shouldn't really be a problem for house-concert presenters, though, should it? None of you doing this is getting rich from your efforts, are you?

That snooping at international borders is pretty obnoxious, of course. It may become an unfortunate fact that folks will have to come into some sort of "compliance" with government demands on that score. If things come to a point where a home-based presenter is forced to withhold taxes from a performer visiting from another country, I'm sure that methods will be invented for somehow counterbalancing things, minimizing the tax burden as much as possible and sharing it among attendees, hosts, and performers.