Buskers of Glasgow - Back on the streets

Since the beginning of July we've been allowed to resume working outside and this has meant a return to busking. With people visiting shops and pubs and coffeeshops, allbeit with booking and seating restrictions in place and contact tracing enabled, there has been an audience to play for. Live gigs are still banned unless they are outdoors and as Autumn draws in, those are less practical. So this means that people who had been supporting themselves through gigging and pub residencies are now forced back onto the street to earn some money. This, however, is good for the page as the acts on the streets are such high quality.

There are fewer livestreams these days as I think the interest in them is waning from an audience perspective and a performer perspective. The performers get very little feedback and it's just through delayed comments and reactions on facebook. I think any donations through paypal have also diminished making it not worthwhile.

I have had a couple of well performing videos including one by Kiera Marks which was picked up by The Music Man page which has 1M followers. This usually benefits the page and the artist as we pick up some new likes as a result. At the moment that vid has >120K views although my instance of it has only 20k views. Also a video from Adam Shaheen did quite well for a week or so with >80K views. But I have had no other runaway virals from my page.

I have resumed the busker of the month profiles which have been doing well, but I do spend money to promote those. Because I am still having to work from home I am finding it very difficult to get time to come up town to record videos. I have to pick and choose the best weather days or just come on the weekend and annual leave/ flexi days. I find this very frustrating as I was enjoying the way I had arranged my life, making vids at lunchtime and hometime and weekends and holidays.

I also had a bit of a success story with Blair Gilmour. I recorded him a year ago and the video was spotted by a scout for The Voice Kids. Blair got on the show and did very well. He got as far as the semi-finals and it was so nice of him and his family to say that my vid helped that happen. I don't often get stories about the impact of the page, but that was a really nice one.

I continue to try and build the audience everyday. At the moment the page has 42K likes and 75K followers on facebook and 3.7K followers on instagram. But the most important thing for me is that I meet new buskers all the time and make new friends including some that I feel will be in my life a long time.

There has still been no resumption of the radio show and as time drags on I feel it will never start again. It might be a coronavirus casualty.

Gigs have yet to resume and I don’t know if they will before Christmas.