How much do buskers make?

I got inspired to ask this question while riding on the subway other day. You see, in New York, there’s a lot of people with many different personalities. As such, whenever you’re riding the MTA (the subway), you never know who’ll enter the train.

It could be a normal person going to work, or a crazy person who screams at everyone around them.

In this case, it was a busker. He had 2 large orange buckets, and when I saw him go into the train I was like “oh boy, here we go – some weird shit’s about to go down.” He plopped one orange bucket upside-down. And then he plopped the other orange bucket rightside-up, which he proceeded to sit inside of. Then, as the kids would say:

• Literally no one:
• Busker: Starts drumming very loudly on an orange bucket and singing.

The drumming was assaultingly loud, but his voice is actually quite soothing. It’d have been a good performance if he didn’t feel the need to obliterate my eardrums with his makeshift drumming.

Anyway, the audio assault lasted for about 30 seconds and he announced something to the likes of “thank you so much for listening, gimme money.”

Then, about 5 New Yorkers gave him money.

After he took his money, he immediately walked to the adjacent car and repeated his assault.

30 seconds, $5. That’s $600/hr. Or $4800 for an 8-hour day – not bad of a day from raping people’s ears. Imagine if he actually had talent.

So all this got me thinking: how much do buskers make? Obviously, the $5/30 seconds can’t really be extrapolated as far out as $600/hr since I’ve only a sample size of one. Things like:

• Location
• Time of the performance
• What your performance is
• Who “performed” before you

Matters a lot. The latter in particular, because literally 3 minutes after the busker left, another person from another car came to our car and just asked for money. Nobody gave them a single dime. I suspect this is because everyone’s thinking “well, I didn’t pay for someone who gave me a performance, so why would I give someone who’s not going to offer anything?”

Likewise, the payers of the past performance would think: “well, I already paid for a performance and I’m satisfied with my goodwill for today.”

I suspect if the next person that came into the car was yet another busker, they’d make nothing due to the same psychological dynamics (i.e. fatigue and lack of novelty).

How Much Do Buskers Make?

Apparently, it varies wildly.

This site says one can do $50/day on weekdays, and $100-$150/day on weekends.

However, this seems a bit low and I think what one earns would vary wildly depending on the city. NYC, for example, has an ‘art’ culture, so a lot of New Yorkers might identify themselves as someone that supports the arts. Hence, more people are willing to pay. Not to mention NYC is much more populated.

Try the same performance in the middle of Iowa? I doubt you’ll earn half as much.

I think the “$100-$150/day” on weekends is a bit low just from my observation at the MTA. I mean, the guy drummed for 30 seconds and grabbed 5 bucks…in just one car. I think he can easily do much more than $300 a weekend if he hustled.

Busker Fatigue

Another google search gave me this site, which says timing matters (duh, nobody’s there to pay you if you’re playing at 2AM) and that they make $42.55/hr for a dual, or $21/hr per person.

For buskers: I wonder how much you make is dependent on whether or not it’s a duo or not?

I feel like duos aren’t that great, because as a customer I don’t think people will pay twice as much to see 2 people performing vs. 1 person. More than likely, I’d just give the same amount of money and oblige to the social pressures of giving money.

On their site, they also talk about fatigue after playing for many hours. This makes sense, which is why I feel like drumming in the MTA is fairly optimal. If you’re good at drumming a nice beat (without assaulting strangers’ eardrums), you can save your voice and not sing. Sure, you might not be able to play 12-hour days, but you should be able to strictly last longer than if you were to play an instrument and sing at the same time.

Though I’m not sure if a pure instrumental would net as much profits vs. if you were to sing and do an instrument.

Reddit’s Answer

On Reddit, a person says he makes about $100/hr.

Like the previous link, it seems like most of these insanely hourly profits can only be gotten at certain hours during the week. So while you can do $100/hr, it doesn’t seem like it is scalable across a 40-hour week, for example.

The Redditor attributes his success to his cello, so if you’re looking to join the buskers gang, you might maximize how much you make by choosing a cello as an instrument, as opposed to just drumming or guitaring.

Optimal Busking

Since I can’t play any instruments except for the piano (and I don’t think I can haul a piano into a train), I’ve a thought experiment.

From the data gathered above (a whopping 3 links) – it seems like the optimal strategy is to take a good instrument, like a cello, and play it car-by-car in the MTA or some subway.

NYC is great because nobody enforces anything. In other cities, they might not let you annoy their subway passengers.

But let me break it down as to why I think this is a great idea.

You want to play on a train the same reason why terrorists want to attack subways. People can’t run, and are forced to listen to your entire performance. Once you’ve given them the performance, you’ll have the principle of reciprocity working in your favor. Everyone’s a potential customer.

Conversely, if you played in an open area, you might not get any money even during rush hour. This is because people are likely in a rush and walking to their jobs, and won’t have time to stop and listen to your entire performance. Nor will they feel obligated to pay even if they listened to the whole thing because they can just leave and there’s no awkwardness.

Another reason why I think the train is so great is because once you have one person pay, you’ll get more people who are likely to pay. In an open area, this chain of payments is less likely because you’ll mostly have people coming in and out of the crowd, so when one person pays, another person might have left already. Whereas in a train, if one person pays, the ‘next person to potentially pay’ is still there because they can’t physically leave. Therefore, playing in an enclosed space like a subway train is great because you maximize the probability of these socially driven chain payments.

Case study: see introduction. The guy kind of sucked and people still paid him.

In sum, I think the optimal thing to do is:

• Play on a train.
• Pick an unorthodoxed instrument so you’ll have some novelty compared to other buskers.
• Keep your sets between 30 seconds to 2 minutes long. No more. This prevents fatigue, and allows you to do a ton of reps and iterate on your performance.

Your Turn

What do you think?
Are you musically talented?
If the money’s good enough, would you consider becoming a busker?
And how much money would you need to make in order for you to join the buskers’ gang?