Nine Ways Busking Fixes What Technology Broke (Part 1)

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Ted Gioia’s recent post about the rise of “the Annoyance Economy” got me thinking about the growing divide between busking and the rest of the entertainment business.

On the one hand you have busking, relatively unchanged for millennia. On the other, the rest of the live performance ecosystem, continually distorted by all kinds of commercial and technological forces.

So, here’s why busking is the antidote to a lot that’s wrong with the entertainment industry today, and we’ll start with the obvious one.

🇬🇧 Between 2020 and 2024, the UK lost 37% of its clubs, with 10 closing every month. 125 music venues closed in 2023 alone (16% of the total), and 46 closed the following year. 🇦🇺 In Australia, a year-long national enquiry found that 1,300 venues closed since 2020, and only half of the country’s festivals had made a profit post-covid. Between 2024 and 2025, 93% of venue owners reported decreasing revenues. 🇩🇪 In Berlin—centre of the global techno scene—around 46% of its clubs are at risk of closing today. 🇺🇸 Half of USA museums have attendance lower than pre-pandemic levels. 🌎 Cinema attendance worldwide is now 68% below what it was in 2019.

What’s going on? There are lots of theories (phone addiction, cultural shifts etc), but one fact is that venues are being hit with serious increases in the costs of rents, energy, advertising and insurance premiums. Added to their woes, government funding has been drastically reduced, while people are spending a lower proportion of their money on going out. These problems are exacerbated by the commissions and fees lost to online ticket sellers like Ticketmaster.

Last but not least, digital streaming services have reduced how much we spend on music to such an extent that everyone, top to bottom, now relies on gig revenues. If you’ve wondered why all the old bands are on reunion tours it’s not because they have something new to offer the world, but because they have mortgages. Venues are so oversubscribed that many have switched to the “pay to play” model, where musicians have to pay a flat fee for the privilege of performing, hoping to earn their money back through taking a percentage of ticket and beer sales.

Busking is an obvious remedy here. Cities are able to host far more entertainers outdoors than their indoor stages would support. Everyone can find somewhere to busk every day, a pitch with a built in audience that’s not (for the most part) fixated on their phones.

Paradoxically, revenues from ticket sales are actually booming at the moment. A report titled “Music Business Analysis Report 2024-2030” says the amount people are spending on live music has been increasing for years, and predicts almost a tripling of market by 2030. How can it be that live music venues are closing and yet live music spending is going up?

The reason is that money is funding superstar stadium tours and giant festivals, like Glastonbury, Coachella and Tomorrowland. Just 10 acts (including retirees The Rolling Stones, Metallica and Madonna) accounted for almost a tenth of the total spend on live music events in 2024, taking $3.3 billion out of $35 billion. This is why your local music venue—which stages local, independent musicians for a local audience—is going out of business, while the overall spend on live music is going up.

This is bad for all the lesser-known musicians who rely on live music in the age of streaming to make a living. They make up the “long tail” of the music industry, a term that describes everyone who isn’t in the top 0.01% of superstars—who are increasing their share of the market:

Busking gives that long tail of musicians a way of earning a living, whether that’s comedians who aren’t on TV, jugglers who aren’t in a big circus, or musicians who aren’t signed to labels.

You don’t need to “make it” as a busker. Your fate isn’t left up to chance, your looks, or whether you play trending music. If you’ve got a good act, and you live in the right place, you can earn a living busking. It may not be much, but if you earn a single dollar in a year from busking, you’ll be earning more than millions of musicians who’ll earn nothing on Spotify this year.

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Meta, Alphabet, Musk and ByteDance don’t care about your career. They don’t care if your fans, followers, friends or family see all of your posts. They don’t pay you for the work you do providing them with data to mine or ads to display. To them, you’re just another exploitable “user”, a statistic.

If you’re an independent artist, to get your “content” seen, you have to compete with every pet photo, relaxation playlist, power wash video, political commentator and dance craze in an endless feed produced by algorithms that are only motivated by addicting their users and displaying ads.

To grow a following today you can’t just announce tour dates or album launches on social media. You are forced into playing to the whims of each platform’s algorithm, creating daily clickable, watchable “content” on multiple sites so as not to get ignored.

The content art buskers produce automatically appears on the feed commute of thousands of people for benefit of tech billionaires their own bank accounts.

It’s not enough that your personal data on tech platforms is sold to political organisations to sway your opinions. It’s not enough that product placements and paid advertising are hidden amongst all the other content. Now platforms have a new business model: to annoy users until they pay:

Service providers have realised that forcing you to watch enough unskippable ads is a good way to get you to pay for ad-free premium accounts. So, when you post a new song, a new promo video or photos someone took at your show over the weekend, you are sending it into this incredibly annoying but addictive ecosystem. This is akin to entertaining the unpaid employees of a company you hate—and the better your content, the better it will serve The Annoyance Economy.

I filmed buskers in 30 countries back in 2011, and there was one thing that really stood out: street shows were invariably the only entertainment in town centres that wasn’t produced in the service of private companies.

There were two exceptions on our travels: Moscow and Havana, both of which had strict controls on where ads could be displayed. Say what you like about the country that brought us Putin (and you’ll probably be poisoned), but walking around the artistically decorated, ad-free underground stations in Moscow was such a breath of fresh air.

Every now and again we get an email along the lines of “is your company dead?”, because we don’t post to social media any more. To Facebook and Instagram users we look dormant.

That’s obviously harming our business. But, the alternative is giving tacit support to billionaire-backed tech empires whose entire business model is psychologically binding their “users” to their phones. I’m not saying you have much of a choice as an independent artist—this is the world we live in. But, almost all the art posted online nowadays is served up and consumed in a way that perpetuates unhealthy behaviours.

The only time you get addicted to a busker you marry them. Also, busking does all the things tech platforms claim to do (like helping you get discovered), but does so in a way that’s good for society and pays you for your work.

‘Dynamic pricing’—the kind that Ticketmaster uses, where the price tickets sell for depends on how in-demand they are—means that even the worst seats at big-name concerts are way more expensive. Added to that, Ticketmaster’s anti-competitive practices, hidden fees and steep commissions, which venues now bake into their basic ticket prices, have made “going out to an event” not just exorbitant but far more frustrating, rightly sparking numerous lawsuits against the company.

Ticketmaster obviously did not invent two-tiered access. You’ve always been able to buy better seats with more money. It’s just now, with venues struggling to stay open, the opportunities for wealthier people to skip queues, dance in VIP areas, attend exclusive shows and get early access to ticket sales is almost ubiquitous at live events.

I could answer this question much more quickly, but I’d like to compare two events from 2017. Lily and I went to a rock concert in Bogotá, Colombia, where the organisers had erected a fence dividing the audience. The front 1/3 of the field was a sparsely attended VIP section. Behind the barrier was everyone else. The band was so annoyed at having to perform in front of so much empty space they told everyone to jump the fence so they could feed off our energy. The VIP section had made the festival worse for everyone—including those who’d paid for it.

The same year as that rock concert our team produced a buskerfest during the Festival Iberoamericano de Teatro de Bogotá, the city’s international theatre festival. People came from all over the world to watch its highbrow indoor shows. Many of them ended up in the park to watch our street performers.

Now, Bogotá boasts a small army of people hauling huge carts of cardboard and plastic to the recycling centre, trash that they’ve separated by hand out of the stuff people have casually thrown away. Most of them aren’t salaried employees of the city, they’re paid by the weight of trash they collect alone, and they are rarely viewed as public-spirited environmentalists. Instead, these informal workers are mostly viewed as people on the bottom of the socioeconomic ladder doing the kind of dirty job nobody else will do.

At our buskerfest, looking out at the crowd, we could see these trash collectors standing shoulder-to-shoulder with people wearing suits and nice jewellery, old and young, of all different races…you know, exactly like you see at a street show.

In short: busking is the only venue for live entertainment that actually unites us.

Coming up in part 2: the music industry is only getting worse; Spotify is now intentionally harming musicians; and the artistic armageddon promised by Artificial Intelligence.

News, stories and gig opportunities from around the world from the last couple of weeks.

🇬🇧I was interviewed by the BBC for the above article about safety and cashless payments. I think I was misquoted at least twice (including in the title of the article), but it’s generally pretty good, focusing on interviews with street performers.

🇺🇸The Downtown Memphis Commission has just relaunched Main Street Sounds at the Main Street Mall. Those words don’t mean much to me, but apparently the DMC got a $30,000 grant to promote and operate the program, which will include curated, scheduled shows. It mentions nothing about paying the musicians for their time. That looks like unpaid gigs to me, so I’ve let the Memphis Federation of Musicians know.

Busking getting you “discovered” examples: 🇮🇪 The two musicians who founded DUG started out as a duo busking on Grafton Street, where they “caught the attention” of a label manager who signed them. 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁳󠁣󠁴󠁿 And a popular Aberdeen busker, David Angus, got signed by Fat Hippy Records based on the strength of the DIY album he made from the proceeds he earned busking.

I just made my first one-off purchase of a news article from a legacy media organisation: 35,000 Indonesian Rupiah (about $2.15). Maybe this is the future of news: pay as you go. The story was about Jakarta’s banning buskers from using Ondel-Ondel costumes, which I previously wrote about here.

A craftsman quoted in that article said that one of the biggest issues Betawi people face today is “waning interest in Betawi traditions among the younger generation”. A survey of 400 randomly-approached people in Jakarta said that ondel-ondel is the most recognised part of Betawi culture. So, you’d expect the craftsman therefore to support the continued use of them in street shows.

But he doesn’t. He considers the costumes to be “too sacred to be used for busking”. He wants more people to know about Betawi culture, but wants it removed from its most visible location so that it’s not associated with street performance.

90% of the respondents to that survey agreed, supporting the ban. This is ironic, because at the bottom of the article, a historian, J.J. Rizal (who I’ve approached to do an interview), criticised the ban, saying ondel-ondel was a part of the city’s street culture:

I’ve reached out to the historian, and will let you know if he answers my questions.

Thanks, and heavy hats,

Nick

This newsletter is the only source of busking news and commentary from around the world. Please consider becoming a paid subscriber.