By Hugh Colwell, Agnes Evangelista, Brydie McDonald, Helen Nozhenkova & Sharon

Pinhasov

“Musical buskers are

the most popular.”

We chose this topic because we think that buskers are a

significant part of Melbourne’s culture, and we

thought it would be interesting to investigate

them and their profession. Also, we all enjoy music and

buskers.

We surveyed both genders almost equally.

We surveyed 100 people using a 6 question survey.

During our survey, we surveyed nearly the same amount of males as we did females, but there were slightly more males.

53%

47%

Gender

MaleFemale

We surveyed people of many different ages.

To get a broader perspective on people’s opinions we surveyed people of all sorts of age groups.

Although fairly even, the majority of people we surveyed were 21 to 30 years old.

11 to 20

21 to 30

31 to 40

41 to 50

Above 50

0

5

10

15

20

25

30

18

26 23

1320

Age group

Most people like buskers but not all the time.

When surveying, we also asked for a reference of interest from our participants.

In doing this, we found that most people showed some interest in buskers and their performances.

Yes No Maybe Sometimes0

5

10

15

20

25

30

35

40

45

50

43

12 10

35

People give loose change to buskers most of the

time.

To find the value of buskers in Melbourne, we asked people how much money they were inclined to give a busker.

We found most people simply gave loose change and very few would give no money at all.

Loose change

$5 $10 None Other0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

66

11 9 113

People usually only watch buskers for a short amount of time.

To further find people’s interest in buskers, we asked people how long, on average, they were likely to watch a busker for.

Our results of this are pretty clear, most people would stay and watch for around 5 minutes.

No time 5 minutes 10 minutes Other0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

6

66

226

Most people think busking is important to Melbourne’s

culture.

To broaden our knowledge of people’s thoughts on buskers and how they contribute to Melbourne, we asked people if they thought busking added to the culture of Melbourne.

We found that almost everyone thought busking added to Melbourne’s culture.

Yes No Don't care

Maybe0

102030405060708090

78

6 4 12

The most popular kind of busker by far is

musical.

Finally and most importantly, we asked our surveyees what type of busker they were most likely to watch and enjoy.

The conclusion drawn from this, was that an overwhelming 69% enjoyed musical buskers the most, which is in support of our hypothesis.

Musical

Magicia

n

Circus

/Stun

tSta

tue None Other

0

10

20

30

40

50

60

70

80

69

5 111 7 7

We interviewed 8 buskers who we asked a variety of questions

relating to busking in Melbourne. These included

questions about the new permit laws that will be enforced in some areas, where they had

busked and how popular certain buskers were.

Elizabeth Russell is the busking and program coordinator from the council of the City of Melbourne. She has been part of the council for 4 or 5 years, and last year was appointed the role of busking and program coordinator.

Elizabeth is mainly in charge of the policy managing and the permitting process. She oversees 1,416 licensed buskers.

She agrees that buskers are a significant part of Melbourne’s culture.

Elizabeth enjoys musical performances and especially enjoys acts that get the crowd involved, however, she doesn’t think of herself as much of a potential busker.

After our research time in the city, our hypothesis was proven correct, that musical buskers are indeed the most popular type of buskers.

People enjoy musical buskers the most because of the variety and unsigned talent in Melbourne.

69% of the people we surveyed enjoyed musical buskers the most followed by circus and stunt with 11%.

Questions?