My Experience Busking in San Francisco

From the article:<p><i>While I&#x27;m playing, I&#x27;ll routinely see a policeman ask a person sleeping on the ground to sit upright. I&#x27;m not sure if that&#x27;s because of the civil sidewalks ordinance or to &quot;prevent obstructions&quot;.</i><p>I don&#x27;t know about San Francisco specifically, but in some cities police forces use this sort of instruction to identify people who need medical assistance: If you&#x27;re able to respond to the police, you&#x27;re probably fine, but if you just lay there then you&#x27;re probably incapacitated by alcohol, drugs, or some other medical condition.

Years ago, there was a man who would stand on Market St. wearing a suit and just kind of dance back and forth singing &quot;Gotta keep smiling&quot;. It wasn&#x27;t a song as such, just a refrain that he would roll around over and over, and he would shuffle and sing and point at passersby and smile, encouraging them to smile.<p>One day my dad stopped and asked him, &quot;You seem sane and well-educated, why do you do this?&quot; (I&#x27;m paraphrasing here.) The man told him, &quot;Sir, I make a hundred dollars a day, tax-free.&quot;<p>(My dad saluted him and walked on.)

Here is a video of Joshua Bell (<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joshua_Bell" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;en.wikipedia.org&#x2F;wiki&#x2F;Joshua_Bell</a>) playing a 3.5 million dollar violin in the subway for 45 minutes and making $32:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=hnOPu0_YWhw</a>

The earnings surprised me. I know a decent software engineer whose effective hourly rate is embarrassingly close to the lower limit of Steve’s reported $15–50 range. On the other hand, that’s busking in SF.

I usually give a dollar or two to performers, especially if they look homeless, unless they are horribly out of tune, in which case sometimes I still tell them the useless advice to get in tune and give them a dollar.

Back in the late 80s, my brother (baroque cello), a friend and I (Baroque Violins) started busking in Harvard Square for fun.<p>One of our favourites was the Mozart Organ Sonatas. We generally made enough money to buy beers at the end of the evening.<p>I guess my biggest memory was the time we started playing in front of Au Bon Pain when we just started out. I thought we were doing OK until some guy, with a grim fierce smile, took out a fistful of pennies and chucked them, one at a time, into the violin case. Apparently we had taken over the spot where a much-loved group regularly played. He made it more than obvious that we were not welcome there. We had no idea there was politics involved!<p>We moved on quickly, with our tails between our legs.<p>One of the nicest things we got was a sketch by a local artist. It&#x27;s still got pride of place in my violin case.

I used to busk, playing guitar and singing in Bradford (UK) city centre in the early 1990s. I wasn&#x27;t very good, but it was funny. £30 on a good day? Not bad for a couple of hours.

I busked in Covent Garden in the middle of the summer for about an hour and made something like £100. That&#x27;s literally my only experience though so it&#x27;s probably an anomaly.

I wonder if those impeccably dressed Jehova&#x27;s Witnesses in SF subway stations collect data on their pamphleteering&#x2F;conversion efforts

I used to busk with a friend on NYC subways. We each made $100 a day for 6 hours of singing consistently.

Just sent a week in SF staying on Union Square loving the trumpeter who played every night. Amazing tone, clearly a professional.

&gt; And I fully understand the picture of inequity created when someone donates to a musician while homeless people are on the ground yards away.<p>&quot;Inequity&quot;? Yea, right. I sure feel inequitably about those who make our public spaces more vs less pleasant.

My son would play his bagpipes at Penguin and Pirates games. The people of Pittsburgh are quite generous. Perhaps partly because of their Scottish heritage--there&#x27;s even an endowed chair of Highland piping at CMU.

Steve - how do you feel about people taking photos or video of you?

I find it saddening that so few people care for culture that he and his peers have even had to consider busking, instead of playing formally at a concert.

Since I can&#x27;t give some coins as I live in another timezone - if you have Paypal I will donate a few bucks.