Street Performers

DALLAS: When I moved to Denver from Atlanta back in 2009, I was in a bad spot. And my mental health just got to a position where I needed to do something expressive. So, I took my guitar and I went down to the Boulder Creek path in Boulder and I sat under this tree. I closed my eyes, and I just sat there and plucked on this instrument for like an hour. And then I opened my eyes and there’s just cash. Ones and fives. I think there was a ten in there. It totaled something like 40 or 50 bucks in an hour. I thought to myself, “Wait a minute — if I actually put some energy into it, this could be legitimate.” 

That’s Bret Dallas.

DALLAS: At least, that’s my stage name. I mean, the I.R.S. knows me as a different entity.

After that day in 2009, Dallas became a professional street performer. He’s spent the past 16 years playing his guitar in alleyways, plazas, and parks in Denver, and, on occasion, in other cities around the country.

DALLAS: I feel compelled to bring music to places where people do not expect music to be.

Performing on the street isn’t for the faint of heart. You need to contend with hecklers, security guards, and other performers jockeying for the same spot.

And there’s no promise that the time and effort will pay the bills.

For the Freakonomics Radio Network, this is The Economics of Everyday Things. I’m Zachary Crockett. Today: Street performers.

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Walk through a touristy area in any big city on a busy afternoon and you’ll likely encounter at least one street performer. There are dancers, fortune-tellers, balloon artists, living statues, and painters. But the most common sights are musicians, like Bret Dallas.

DALLAS: I’m a loop performer. And so if you know what a loop pedal is, it’s a pedal that you play through and then you press a button and it records what you’re playing, and you use that as the foundation for a melody, for a song, that you can then sing over. 

He has a guitar, a loop pedal, and two amps, which are powered by a portable power bank. Altogether, he says it’s around $4,000 worth of gear.

DALLAS: My entire rig folds up into a hand cart and my guitar case on my back.

There are a few different types of street performances. You have circle shows, where a performer gathers a crowd and stands in the middle. Those tend to be some kind of choreographed show with a beginning, middle, and end, like a magic act. You’ve got stoplight performances, where jugglers or mimes perform quick shows in the crosswalk at red lights. Then, there are walk-by acts, like Dallas’s, where the performer stays in one spot for a few hours at a time and hopes to get tips from passersby. Many street performers call the location where they set up a “pitch” or a “stoop.”

DALLAS: What I look for in a stoop, number one is going to be acoustics. So a lot of times I’ll look for amphitheater-style or corridor-style stoops that allow me to really maximize the emission of the sound I’m making. 

That’s not just an artistic preference. The further Dallas’s sound carries, the more potential tippers he reaches. When Dallas first started performing, he thought the best locations were the places with the most foot traffic. But he found out over time that it’s more about the type of people who are in the crowd.

DALLAS: People walking around in business suits at a quick pace on their way from one place to the next — it’s just not as captive of an audience, right? People who are ambling or walking slower, maybe eating ice cream, looking around, enjoying the day — that is the crowd I’m after.

Like many street performers, Dallas has about a dozen go-to spots around Denver.

DALLAS: I find that bodies of water are really, really good. So lakes, places where there are boardwalks next to shoreline, riversides — ah! — people just love that.

Over the past century, many cities have attempted to ban or heavily regulate street performance — and in most cases, the courts have ruled that putting on a show in public is protected by the First Amendment. But cities still have limitations on things like decibel levels and the type of performance that’s allowed. And some require permits for certain hot spots. Las Vegas has set up a registration process — they need it in order to manage the abundance of musicians, dancers, and celebrity impersonators off the main strip.

DALLAS: I have played in Las Vegas. They have circles painted on to the strip — you can’t leave that circle. It’s a very structured, rigid process. 

Dallas has experienced a dose of this in Denver, where permits are now required for some popular locations. That includes the 16th Street Mall, a big outdoor shopping center in Denver’s business district.

DALLAS: There’s no fee, but you have to get registered and, you know, they have a copy of your license. They know generally what your rig looks like. And so if you start breaking rules, they will pull your permit and you won’t get to play. And that is the bane of my existence is, you know, a security guard or a police officer coming over saying, “Hey look you can’t play here. I’m sorry, but you’re violating the noise ordinance’, and they’ll make some reference to a code or some statute and then that’ll be it, I’ll have to leave.

Police officers and security guards aren’t the only thing to contend with. Sometimes, it’s other performers who set up too close for comfort.

DALLAS: We’ve got a five piece brass band on this street corner. They decided to point my direction, and there’s this standoff. One of the guys came over and he was like, “Look, man, there’s seven of us and one of you. I don’t know what you think you’re gonna do with that guitar.” And it got contentious.

There’s even the occasional spat with people who live in residential buildings near places where Dallas is permitted to play.

DALLAS: I was playing in one of the alleys on the 16th Street Mall and out of nowhere, there was this explosion about 20 inches from my left foot. And I looked over and there was this stainless steel thermos of boiling water that was there destroyed right next to where I was standing. Needless to say, I didn’t go back and play in that alley anymore. 

On the street, there are good days and bad days. Sometimes, people give Dallas a standing ovation. Other times, he pours his heart out to an empty sidewalk.

DALLAS: I will show up sometimes, have a great expectation, it’s a great day, awesome mood, and I play some of the best music I’ve ever made and no one cares. I’m lumped into a category of people that some might describe as panhandling or, you know, begging. I’m an eyesore or an earsore to people.

So, after putting up with all of this, how much can a street performer expect to earn from a hard day’s work? That’s coming up.

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In his years of playing music on the street, Bret Dallas has learned that optimizing a performance for economic gain isn’t just about the location. In an increasingly cashless economy, even the mechanism he uses to collect money makes a difference.

DALLAS: I’ve experimented with this a lot. I used to think that the most obvious place to put money was in a folded open guitar case. But what I do now is I have a sign that says ‘tip me’ a Venmo Q.R. code. I would say the majority of the tips I get are electronic these days.

Going digital is partly a safety precaution. Because having a case full of bills can pose a risk.

DALLAS: I was well into a Saturday afternoon set. I probably got 20 or thirty bills sitting in the tip case. These young men, they just stepped briskly up to my case, they swooped down with both arms and they grabbed almost every last bill. And they turned around and they just took off. I learned a lesson in that experience and that was: don’t let the pot grow too large.

Dallas has developed something of a sixth sense for the type of person who will leave a tip.

DALLAS: People who are vacationing are generally the best tippers. Also, I’ve also noticed that for some reason parents of small children love to use their kids as a proxy to tip the musician. Toddlers will stop and listen, and they’ll be like, “Mom, look, a guitarist! Listen to the music!” and they’ll bop around. And then mom is fishing in her wallet for a couple of bills and she reaches down and she hands the bills to the kids and says, “Okay, go put it in his case.”

In Dallas’s experience, there isn’t necessarily a correlation between how engaged someone is and whether or not they open their wallet. Some people will linger for 30 minutes and leave without tipping. Others will briskly walk by and leave a few bucks. The sweet spot seems to be people who are semi-interested.

DALLAS: The ones that stop and listen for maybe two or three minutes, those seem to be the most prolific tippers — “Here, take this $5, take this $10. That’s my gratitude, and I’m on my way.”

CROCKETT: If you had to throw out an estimate, what percentage of people who do pass by on a daily basis would you say actually tip? 

DALLAS: I’d probably say maybe three percent, maybe five.

That might sound small. But it can add up. Dallas typically plays for around 3 hours at any given time. And he says his earnings can rival those of a good desk job.

DALLAS: If I’m setting up in a decent spot and the weather is good, and I have a decent amount of earshare. I would say a hundred dollars an hour is not unreasonable. My record is when I played on the Pike Place Market in Seattle. Hundreds, if not thousands of people were coming and going. I made well over a thousand dollars in about two and a half, three hours.

But the income of a street performer can be highly variable. For every thousand-dollar day, there are some $20 dollar days. A spate of bad weather, or, say, a global pandemic, can leave a performer out to dry. At various times over the past 16 years, street performing has been Dallas’s main source of income. Sometimes, he’ll supplement that with paid gigs at bars or events. But as he’s grown older, he’s taken on other types of work to make ends meet.

DALLAS: About eight or nine years ago, I started doing freelance copywriting. I also have some dividend investments. I kind of wad it all up at the end of the month and pay my bills. I don’t think I could survive on this 100 percent alone.

We talked to other street performers for this episode, in expensive cities like San Francisco and New York. Like Bret Dallas, most of them had some kind of supplemental income — whether it was playing booked gigs, or moonlighting as a delivery driver. But a select few are able to pay the bills with street performing alone. Dallas says this is more common with performers who do circle shows — routines where someone gathers a big crowd and gets a payoff at the end.

DALLAS: There’s a gentleman who does flame-type juggling. This guy will sit on top of a unicycle and juggle, like, flaming chainsaws. And he’s an outstanding performer, and he’s also very good at commercializing his performances. And he’ll spend five minutes reinforcing to the crowd why it’s so important that they tip as generously as they can.

That little plea at the end of a performance is called a hat speech. And some performers have mastered it.

DALLAS: He was easily making hundreds of dollars at the end of a 30 minute set with maybe a crowd of about 100 people. So if you do the math on that, let’s say he does three or four performances in an afternoon and he does that twice or three times a week. I mean, it’s a good living if you can do it like that.

For Brett Dallas, though, the money is only a small part of the craft.

DALLAS: I’m not doing this for any kind of commercial success. I’m doing this not for any result aside from bringing people music. And I have found that going into a place where there are not four walls, where there is complete freedom. Where there is no expectation of beautiful music being played. That is where I belong. I want to reach people who are not expecting music, who are having maybe a bad day. It goes beyond making money. In a perfect world, I would inspire people to go out and make music on their own. Do what I’m doing, bring your passion to the streets. People need it, you know?

For The Economics of Everyday Things, I’m Zachary Crockett.

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This episode was produced by me and Sarah Lilley, and mixed by Greg Rippin. We had help from Daniel Moritz-Rabson. And thanks to listeners David Steensma, David Heaton-Bush, and Chris Walker for suggesting this topic. If you have an idea for an episode, feel free to email us at everydaythings@freakonomics.com. Our inbox is always open. All right, until next week.

CROCKETT: You get a lot of “Free Birds”? 

DALLAS: That’s a whole other —