Beyond the realm of cash: street performers and payments in the online world

Meg Elkins and Tim Fry

Journal of Cultural Economics, 2022, vol. 46, issue 2, No 2, 248 pages

Abstract: Abstract Street performers are able to contribute to a fabric of a city’s creative dynamic. The exchange for money between a street performer and an audience is a changing landscape. As less cash is carried on people’s person and audiences want to participate in exchange, the industry is ripe for disruption. The paper uses a unique data set from the online busking platform ‘The Busking Project’ to analyse individual donations to 3757 active buskers. Using a Heckman selection model, we find that the number of fans does influence the number of donations and the artist’s genre matters for the likelihood of receiving donation and the amount received. Musicians are more likely to receive a donation; however, it is a smaller donation amount than other performers. The method of payment for receiving a donation and the anonymity of the donor also influences the amount received. The geographic location matters for receiving a donation but not the amount received.

Keywords: Busking; Digitisation; Social media; Platform economy; Heckman selection (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: C24 O35 Z11 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2022
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
http://link.springer.com/10.1007/s10824-021-09421-8 Abstract (text/html)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:kap:jculte:v:46:y:2022:i:2:d:10.1007_s10824-021-09421-8

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
http://www.springer. ... cs/journal/10824/PS2

DOI: 10.1007/s10824-021-09421-8

Access Statistics for this article

Journal of Cultural Economics is currently edited by Federico Etro and Douglas Noonan

More articles in Journal of Cultural Economics from Springer, The Association for Cultural Economics International Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Sonal Shukla () and Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing ().