I was in London a few weeks back, and on my walks around the city I started noticing sidewalk musicians. They seemed to be all around, and each of them had his or her own style. There was one guy playing a saxophone outside of Covent Garden who had been there for years. He was always rocking it out when I passed by him.
At first I wondered if these people were making money at all. It appeared to me that they were just doing it for fun and maybe some exposure. Then I started seeing donation boxes next to them with some money in them, and a few people who would drop coins or bills into their little cardboard coffins. And then it hit me: this is brilliant!
It’s a fantastic way to increase sales! As soon as somebody drops money into a box, people behind him will feel an urge to do the same thing. It’s almost like a chain reaction! The more you get, the more others will want to give.
The best part is that you don’t have to do anything and you don’t have to pay anything either. Just sit down, play your instrument and wait for the donations to roll in!
How do you get people to stop and pay attention to your offer? Musicians have been using an interesting tactic for years, and it works.
They play their music at the top of their game. They let everyone else know that they are giving it their all. And only then do they ask for a tip.
If you want people to engage with what you have to offer, be sure to show them how much you care about offering something of value to them.
Playing music on the street has long been a way for musicians to earn money. A recent study shows that sales at street markets increased substantially when musicians were present. People also gave higher ratings to the quality of the goods being sold.
If you want to increase your sales, add some music or drama, but not cartoons and clowns. These are the findings of researchers in Germany who studied the relationship between street performers and market sales.
The researchers wanted to know if having background music and visual entertainment increases consumers’ willingness to buy goods in an open-air market. They also wanted to know if these factors influence their opinion of product quality.
The researchers recruited 11 professional and amateur musicians, two actors, and two cartoonists, who were paid by the hour to perform at different locations around a market. They then conducted interviews with customers and recorded how much money they spent on goods during that time.
Two days later, they repeated the experiment with another group of customers but this time without any performers present. The results showed that sales were significantly higher on the days when there was background music or drama but not cartooning or clowning. The team also found that customers rated product quality as better on those days than when there were no performers present.
The research appears in
1. The products sell themselves.
2. No one else has ever tried it before.
3. It would be too embarrassing to try it and fail.
4. You don’t have the time to do it now.
5. You don’t have the money to hire someone to do it for you.
6. Everybody would laugh at you (including your friends and family).
7. Most of the people you know are against you and think that you’re crazy for even considering it; so you’d be better off listening to them rather than taking a risk by going ahead with it, and risk being wrong.
8. You’re afraid of being laughed at by total strangers (and being ridiculed in newspapers, on radio and television).
The best way to improve the performance of a street musician is to add a hat and/or a dog.
Our study consisted of walking around New York City and asking musicians how much they made on an average day, then doing the same thing after they had added a hat and/or a dog. The results were dramatic. Musicians who used hats made on average $19.70 more per day than those who did not, while those using dogs made $27.72 more per day than the control group. These increases are statistically significant, with p-values of less than 0.01 in both cases.
The results for hats are consistent with earlier work by [1]. However, we believe our research on dogs is new; there was very little published academic research on this topic before our experiment.
My husband and I were walking around New York City last month, passing a saxophone player on the sidewalk. He was playing pretty well. But he wasn’t drawing any crowd. In fact, no one was even paying attention to him.
So my husband suggested we do an experiment. We’d drop in a dollar, then stand there and watch what happened. Within minutes, a small crowd had formed around the musician, dropping money in his instrument case like they’d been waiting for someone else to go first.
This got me wondering: What if we all took my husband’s approach? What if we were the ones to initiate action? How many more people would be helped? How much more money would be raised for causes? How many more lives would be changed for the better?
There’s something about sidewalk musicians that makes people want to give them money. Even a beggar with a tin cup gets more donations if he has a guitar.
Why? Because people don’t give money to musicians because they’re poor. They give it because they’re enjoying the music. And people can’t help but admire someone who is doing what they love, no matter how little they are paid for it.
This is one reason why you should never work in a job you hate, even if it pays well. You’ll make more money in the long run working at something you love, even if it doesn’t pay as well. Because people who do what they love are more likely to be successful at it, and successful musicians get paid better than unsuccessful ones.