Your local street musicians have been making money for years. All they need is to learn how to sell the right products and services. They used to perform on sidewalks, but now they play indoors. And their audience is growing.
Your local street musicians are small businesses where most of the income comes from selling music and merchandise instead of tickets and beer. But you can make a lot more money if you seek out the right customers: tourists and upscale shoppers who spend more than $75 per year on entertainment. You can also add value by making sure your product is high quality and at the right price point.
Many musicians make a living from selling CDs, but the music business is not necessarily a good place for them to be. One reason is that bar owners rarely want to give them enough space to perform. Another problem is that some of the people who listen to their music are demanding fans, and if they don’t get what they want, they become…unhappy.
So many musicians are frustrated because they are required to live in the kind of world where the music business is like working in a nuthouse. But they could actually be making more money than they do if they had access to a different economy.
Let’s start by looking at one thing you can’t buy: street credibility. When you walk down the street with your guitar and play for tips, people smile and say hello a lot more than when you’re standing on street corners trying to sell something.
Name:selling used clothing
If you’ve ever been in a city you’ll know that there are all kinds of people who play music on the street. They’re called street musicians. They play guitar and panpipes, but also keyboards and drums and other things.
They’re everywhere, and they make a living from playing, but how much? And how do they make it?
The first thing to realize is that there is a huge range of skills between the best street musician and the worst. If you can play just about any instrument, you will want to be a professional musician – because you can charge more for your services than a street musician. If you can only play one instrument, you would probably be fine just playing on the street.
But if you are a professional musician, how do you make money? There are three main ways: gigs, licenses, and sponsorships.
Gigs are where you get paid to play somewhere. You may need to book your own gigs through an agent or through word of mouth. The big difference between amateur musicians and professionals here is that professionals have capital – money or other assets – that they can put toward their career; they don’t have to live off their parents like amateurs do. The way this capital is used varies widely between different
A street performer, who plays music and sings for tips on a sidewalk, is not just a guy with a guitar and a harmonica. He has a unique skillset—he’s good at holding an audience, and knows how to work the system so that he can make money from it.
That means one of two things: Either his skill is not very valuable, or it is more valuable than he realizes.
Most people think it’s more valuable—that they’re just doing well-paying jobs that they don’t realize they have. In fact, the vast majority of what you would call musicians are only one step up from street performers.
When you hear someone sing in public, you naturally want to watch them. You want them to be good—but because you’re there already, you don’t care if they are good or not. You just want them to be entertaining enough that you will keep watching them (and also listen to their recorded music). This is true even if they aren’t actually very good: We instinctively like people who seem to be trying hard—it feels like we get something out of that effort even if we can’t see how it works.
Sidewalk musicians are not really a thing. They’re just a name for a kind of music that is on the street, which means it’s not in mainstream, and doesn’t get a lot of attention.
But there are lots of different kinds of music on the street, and they can all be very popular. The concept of a sidewalk musician isn’t valid. But if you want to make money doing what people think of as street music, start by understanding exactly what they mean.
The first step is to realize that it’s not enough to play music on the street; you have to attract an audience. You have to find out where and when people are likely to hear you. Then you have to do something that will get those people excited about your music.
There are two ways to get ahead: You can do something the audience wants or you can make the audience want what you’re doing.
The street musician is not just a guy with a guitar and an iPod. He is also a street performer, which means he has to be good at two things: playing the guitar and singing. The odds are against him being that good, but that’s okay–he can make up for his lack of talent by being creative.
The way he makes up for his lack of talent is to be entertaining. People who are entertaining don’t need to be good–they just need to know how to entertain you. A lot of people seem to think that entertainment is based on skill. But it isn’t: if you tell me the Beatles were more talented than Bob Dylan, I’m not going to be entertained by your argument. If you can competently entertain me, I’ll listen to anything you play.
Musicians make money from sound. But it’s a very odd kind of money. Performing in public is not like selling something, or raising money for a charity. No one is making you do it. If you don’t want to be in the audience, you’re free to leave.
The way to get paid for making music is to charge for performances. This can seem odd: charging for performing is like charging for giving blood, or trying to sell your neighbour’s house by moving in yourself and claiming expenses.
But think about it more carefully. If you are doing a concert, you get paid when people come out and buy drinks and food, and they pay at the door with cash; if you are playing at a bar, you get paid when people drink and dance, and they pay at the bar with cash; if you are playing at a club, you get paid when people buy bottles of alcohol and pay at the door with cash; if you are playing at somebody’s home, you get paid after everyone has had a nice time and left a tip on the table.
You can also get paid by selling merchandise: CDs, t-shirts and so on. If your album has been released on vinyl as well, that means hundreds of little records