If you visit Pike Place Market on a sunny day, amongst the shops, vendors, and flowers, you may see more than a dozen street performers, otherwise known as “buskers.” What you may not realize is that buskers are essential economic, cultural, and political figures at the Market. Every year, they perform on the Market sidewalks for more than 10 million national and international visitors. Buskers are an integral part of Seattle’s “soundmark,” what Gordon Hempton, an acoustic ecologist, describes as “a landmark, only for noises.”
Buskers encourage tourists and locals alike to shop, eat, and linger in the Market. Many visitors find themselves dancing and singing with people from around the world while they listen to buskers performing. Buskers and visitors often shake hands, share stories, and connect with each other about music, place, and memory. Buskers contribute to the economic vitality of the Market by encouraging a sense of community and familiarity along the sidewalks and alleyways, so that visitors feel safe, comfortable, and entertained while roaming and shopping. Parents with children on each arm often stop to sway to music, a brief respite from the locomotion of the crowd.
However, the tiny percent of buskers who actually make a living performing at the Market consists of fewer than 20 musicians, many of whom have been playing for over 20 years. These musicians work during the long rainy season when the temperatures can drop to 22° F and through the summer months when it can reach over 80° F. They share different musical cultures from folk, gospel, and classic rock, to pop and political avant-garde, and play instruments both familiar (e.g., guitar and fiddle) and unusual (e.g., a saw played with a bow). Many of the most seasoned Market performers also play Seattle’s nightclubs and the events of city’s elite.
During the spring of 2013, as a part of our doctoral studies at the University of Washington, we met, interviewed, and followed five established buskers at the Market. Initially, we were studying the information sharing practices of buskers, particularly around how they mark their performance spots. We learned that buskers don’t use digital technologies during their performances, to share information with other buskers, or to coordinate their use of performance spaces. Their social and professional relationships and behaviors are grounded on the Market pavement. Some of the buskers we talked to use the Internet to promote their music via a dedicated website or Facebook, but their use of technology for business in the Market is decidedly low-tech.
However, the locals and tourists who walk by and gather around buskers on a daily basis are “always on” – smart phones in hand, they are engaging with people and information both in and well beyond the Market’s alleyways. This appears to be a rather mundane observation at first, but our interviews with buskers reveal the ways in which the audiences’ information practices are disrupting their performances.
As smartphones have become ubiquitous, buskers have become discouraged about performing their music at the Market. Visitors who use smartphones often stop to take pictures and videos of buskers without asking for permission and without respecting their personal or professional dignity. They use buskers as props in photo ops, asking them to hold things and – mid-performance – freeze for the camera. And visitors have also taken busker’s hats or other articles from their heads or hands mid-performance.
These disruptive acts for the camera take the emphasis away from music and from the capacity of music to build community in a specific time and place. These digital shorts – whether photo or video – cross the physical boundaries of the Market and reach a virtual audience of the friends, family and clients of visitors.
Visitors share their pictures and videos of buskers with friends and family in faraway places, use them to make money, and to practice photography. When we talked with visitors using smartphones, they expressed the personal significance of sharing busker performances with absent loved ones. A woman using her iPad to capture a video of a banjo player planned to share it with her mother who “is trapped in a nursing home.” Another woman used her iPhone to text a photo of a gospel choir performance to her daughter who is away at college, “to remind her of the times we came down here together. Good memories.”
Visitors who post busker photos and videos to virtual spaces, such as Flickr, Facebook, Instagram, and other online digital spaces, take control of the buskers’ images and can make a profit from the buskers’ performances. A man with a large video camera who spent several minutes taking footage of a banjo player told us he was “making a WGBH web series.” Another man with a video camera told us he was “capturing footage for a travelling group from Britain.” A woman using her iPhone to take pictures of a gospel choir said, “I’ll post it on my Facebook wall. I’ll probably print it and put it up in my living room. Maybe sell it.”
Over the course of 150 hours of observation and interviews at the Market, during several weekends and weekdays in the spring of 2013, we observed that visitors with smartphones are three times more likely to cache their photos online than to produce cash for buskers’ tip jars.
Visitors who take snapshots rarely pay for the pictures and videos they take. Out of every three visitors with smartphones who stop to listen and capture buskers performing, one tip is given to buskers. For example, in a one-hour session on a Friday afternoon, we observed 170 visitors with smartphones crowded around a busker and only 12 offered a tip.
For the most part, buskers never see the benefits of their online presence. One of the buskers explained, “People think they’re doing me a favor, like, ‘Hey man, I’m going to make you famous!’ But that’s never happened. If I could make myself famous by performing on YouTube, I could have posted a video myself!” In a telephone interview with us, Nick Broad, founder of The Busking Project, commented that although free streaming services like YouTube might “marginally count in a busker’s favor,” the disadvantage is that a busker’s act “becomes completely diluted” and he or she loses control of how his or her information is used.
Many of the buskers at Pike Place Market have been working there for more than a decade, following a tradition of busking in the Market that began in the 1960s, before the Pike Place Market Preservation and Development Authority (PDA) existed. Busking reemerged nation-wide during the sixties in the form of the folksinger, whose musical and social relevance to anti-conformist political attitudes attracted audiences to “return to the street.” But an audience armed with smartphones is threatening to change the value of public performance from free speech on the street to free fodder for Facebook.
It’s time to take a stand for the musicians who have helped to sustain Washington State’s most lucrative tourist attraction. Buskers pay $30.00 each year to perform for millions of visitors. When we reach for our smartphones, let’s reach for our wallets, too.
Amanda Menking
http://seattletimes.com/html/dannywestneat/2009054780_danny15.html