Busking - A Viable Career Path Or A Cheap Hobby? - Callum Court

On Monday 11th of October me and my fellow student, Ashley, decided that we would get involved with our local community doing something that we love. Busking. The idea came about as we were walking down Kingston highstreet and we saw a pair of teenagers playing music with just two guitars and one person singing. We thought to ourselves if they could do it… Why can’t we?

With the goal of finding out whether busking is a financially worth it experience we began practicing. We realised that this was much harder than we expected, putting in 5 hours of work on top of our studies per week in order to get a setlist of only 6 songs. This was the start of our doubts. Would busking really be the lucrative adventure we believed it would be?

We set up in Kingston outside of a closed m&s on a busy section of the town and began to play various songs. Despite how much we enjoyed the experience, the first hour didn’t go well; We were only able to make a measly £2.50 between the two of us. However, with the help of some batteries to charge the portable speaker we took with us, the atmosphere soon began to change. Soon we were making £10 an hour and by the end of the day we were able to take home £30.

Overall, we have learned from this experience that busking, despite the large amount of dedication, work and patience required to pull it off, can be an extremely rewarding experience. While, in our case, we were not able to make enough money to come close to being employed, the experience in my opinion makes the effort more than worth it.