The Busker’s Guide to the Galaxy

by The Busking Project CIC in London, England, United Kingdom

A crowd-sourced online archive that supports buskers, entertains, and helps keep street performance alive in the 21st century, is now launching!

The Big Busking Giveaway

To celebrate this launch we introduced a giveaway competition on buskers.guide, which is now in full swing!This is an opportunity to ‘amp up’ (sorry) your busking pursuits by creating meaningful conversations and content on the world’s only community website dedicated to busking advocacy.

You get a chance to win a Cube Street II and some of the world’s best loop pedals!

All we ask is that you help us build a stronger and more useful community online.Why do a prize giveaway for a community site? Because we happen to be competing with the world’s most addictive algorithms vying for your attention, so we’d like to kickstart this launch with a bang.

Participate in our giveaway competition and win:

1st Prize  – Cube Street II (worth approx. £300)

2nd Prize – RC-500 (worth approx. £280)

3rd prize – RC 5 (worth approx. £180)

 

How do you win?

  • Sign up to buskers.guide (<CLICK HERE) and create discussion threads that are valuable to the busking community.
  • Be creative, relevant to busking, and start a conversation
  • It doesn’t matter how much you post but what you post.
  • An international consortium of advocates and activists will judge your entries and pick winners.

Winning posts will be chosen on a mixture of post interactions (likes/comments) and how valuable we feel your posts are to the wider busking community.

The last date to enter the competition is 31st July 2022.

Get started and have fun while you’re at it 🙂

The Idea Behind The Guide

This tool is supposed to support street performers with grassroots campaigning. We are hoping it can help stem the tide of anti-busking legislation that seems to be affecting buskers all over the world.

It’s also intended as an alternative to the hundreds of disassociated groups on the corporate beast that is Facebook. This means no ads, no sponsorships, we’re not selling your data, and we’re not trying to get you addicted.

It’s just a community space that could radically improve the lives of buskers worldwide.

How Does It Work?

Buskers create articles, just like how we all can write stuff on Wikipedia. They can report where and when they were fined, or promote a petition, or suggest what equipment is the best for the street. Or, maybe they’ll ask for help fighting a council trying to pass a new law.

There will also be “edutainment” for non-buskers, like the surprising array of celebrities who began their careers as street performers, or the historical impact of busking dating back millennia.

We are trying to transform the way people see street performance, dispelling myths and revealing truths, while helping buskers to organise, earn, busk, and defend their rights. With your help, it’s going to be huge.

The guide’s website is now live, funded, and already has a lot of good content on it. Here are some of the various sections of the site:

  • Museum: A fun, comprehensive archive of how buskers have influenced the world, in our historical events and media.
  • Tools: All the stuff that helps you in your day to day lives, including equipment and guides.
  • Legal: Arrests, court cases, legislation, campaigners and licences – all in the name of helping defend your rights to busk. 
  • General: Chit chat, news, tips and anything that doesn’t fit in elsewhere.
  • Support: Organisations who work with buskers, photographers, videographers, and anyone else offering you a service.

Our Motivation

Busking is more culturally important now than ever before.

Busking is a great, viable way for independent artists to make a living, but they’re facing increasing criminalisation and a world that’s simply not carrying cash anymore. Covid has had a staggering effect, but it has only accelerated what started years ago.

Put simply: our high streets are dying, live music venues are closing, arts funding is down and commercialism has permeated almost every part of the music industry.

In other words, busking is more at risk – and more important – than it ever has been.

That’s what motivates us. We are here to save busking from further decline.

So again, please create a profile on buskers.guide, and add your voice to the community.

——

Thanks!

The Busking Project Team