It’s been ten years since we first launched, so I thought it would be a nice trip down memory lane to see how we got here.

Enjoy!


In 2014, Lily and I decided to build busk.co.

All the data showed that a cashless society was rapidly incoming. Buskers would have to start accepting cashless tips. So, we thought we’d built a website to help them out.

When we told street performers about the idea…well, the response was a little rough.

Some buskers responded that cash would always rule, making digital tips unnecessary. They were the nice ones: “thanks for the offer, but I don’t think we’ll need it”.

Others proclaimed that busk.co heralded the death of street performance. To them, cashless payments went against what they viewed as a ‘busking ethos’.

And there were others who viewed us as outsiders only in it for the profit.

The first photos I have of our new idea. These were the original designs for the tipping platform, from all the way back in April 2014


We should remember for a second what the internet was like back then. In the 1990s and early 2000s the internet, as promised, was supposed to democratise information, create equal opportunities, build communities and benefit us all with a supposedly ‘sharing’ economy.

But by the 2010s that optimism had died. A small number of venture capitalist-backed start ups had become some of the biggest companies on the planet by turning us—our minds, our desires, our personalities—into products to sell to advertisers, monopolised vast data empires, and found novel ways of exploiting people for profit.

My first experience presenting our ideas at the YouBloom music conference in Dublin, in June 2014. According to one attendee, the only time any panelist or industry expert had claimed to know how a musician could actually make money in the current climate was on the street.


Paywalls, polarisation, digital addiction, the erosion of privacy and adverts everywhere had ruined the internet, and was now threatening the real world. Political commentators were even starting to wonder whether democracy itself could survive when the ‘marketplace of ideas’ was rife with bots, troll farms and algorithmically boosted disinformation.

The internet was toxic, and had been made that way by choice, and for profit.

The original team in August 2014. From left to right: Pahal Nopani (community/marketing), Vicki Cheng (funding/partnerships), Jérôme Charvet (developer), Stephan Mullard (assistant and resident busker), Liliana Maz (co-founder and COO), and me.


I mention all of that because it wasn’t surprising, in that climate, that buskers would mistrust us.

Nor was it surprising that the artists who’d busked longest, who’d lived longest, and who’d seen buskers be exploited and undermined for the longest were the most mistrustful.

However, some early adopters did jump on board, and the press lapped it up. Journalists would walk past a busker using a QR code, and see it as a fun, quirky story.

An article from April 2014 in “Sussex World”. Note the QR code went to “m.tbproj.com/timbolwell”. We didn’t yet have busk.co (which was donated to us later that year), and we needed a short URL. This, unfortunately, was what I came up with.


Between 2014 and 2019, only a handful of buskers used us every year. That number did keep growing, but for us to become popular two things had to happen:

• Buskers would have to recognise they were losing tips from people not carrying cash.
• And audiences would need to learn how to use QR codes.

One of our first signs being used in the New York Subway in March 2015. The sign also promoted BuskNY, which was fighting for buskers’ rights at the time.


And that’s exactly what happened during covid. While we spent our efforts trying to help buskers find emergency funding, several street performers (without us knowing) began using busk.co to hat their audience during online Zoom shows, sharing a link to their busk.co profile in their comments section in order to receive digital tips.

Designs of the map and tip screens for our short-lived app, from May 2015.


Once lockdowns ended in 2021, buskers who’d been using us online decided to use us in the street. Cash was now considered a “disease vector”, and people were carrying less than ever.

Both during lockdowns and afterwards, buskers had taken the initiative. They were facing a crisis, needed a fix, and lucky for them (and lucky for us) we’d happened to create the right platform at the right time.

Promotion for our app launch in December 2015 on the banks of the River Thames.


Amazingly, even my mum now knew how to use a QR code. As had everyone else. Also, the performance arts industries had discovered that the streets were the only covid-safe venues. The importance of street art had become evident.

The result was that we found it a little easier to get grant funding, which, in turn, meant we could fund the improvements of our platform that we’d always wanted but could never afford.

Part of our Bogotá team in September 2016. From left to right: Jansen Peña (developer), Camila Hidalgo (assistant), a local guitarist that I’ve shamefully forgotten the name of (and will update once I learn it), Santiago Buendia (editor), and me.


Throughout this time, we stuck to the ideals we were founded on:

• The internet doesn’t have to be awful.
• We don’t do product placements or display any ads.
• We only track enough data to make our system work, and don’t sell data to third parties.
• We don’t paywall our core features.
• We price our paid products at what we can sustain, rather than the highest price our users can afford
• And paid features should earn payers far more than it costs them.

Lily doing promotion for the street festival we produced in Bogotá, titled ‘Borolo’, in March 2018. It took place over three days in Parque Nacional and had several thousand people attend. A high point in our ten-year history.


Now we have entered what I consider to be our “golden period”. The numbers are looking great, we’re helping more buskers every month and we don’t start each year wondering how we’re going to survive.

Best of all—at least for my mental health—we get a lot less negative feedback. Even our biggest detractors over the last ten years are now taking in cashless payments, either via busk.co or one of our competitors. Some still have a problem with us, but that group is less loud, and our fans have gotten a lot louder.

In fact, I’m often deeply embarrassed by the positive things street performers say about us. Our current success was hugely accelerated by covid, and I find it tough to be proud of the fact that it took a global catastrophe that took millions of lives for busk.co to thrive.

The official tartan of street performers, designed by Kate Mior, registered by Brian Wilton (a.k.a. the Tartan Ambassador) and conceived of and paid for by us. Buskers picked the colours: black for how commonly it is worn by street performers;  red symbolising creative passion and fearlessness; gold for the good fortune of a heavy hat; and grey and white for the streets on which they perform. The grey threads number 24, symbolising how, at any given time of day, a street performer is entertaining an audience somewhere in the world. The adjacent black blocks are comprised of 100 threads—one for each performance that perceived busking wisdom suggests are needed to be proficient.


That said, busk.co has always been, at its core, an emergency response. We have never been ‘futurists’ or ‘tech advocates’. Instead, we created a platform to help prevent buskers being wiped out by the digital revolution.

If we’ve proven our worth thanks to another crisis, and gotten stronger as a result, perhaps that’s not something to feel ashamed about?

Street performers have gotten so many tips recently that tips pre-2021 don’t even register on graphs this scale any more. Just this last weekend we processed more tips than in the first seven years of busk.co combined!


And what of the next ten years? I think the future is bright. We have a business model that gives us a little more freedom than before. Perhaps we can spend that freedom a little more on community building and artistic projects.

We have a long list (currently around sixty items) of things we want to work on or improve, some large, some small, but it would be nice to start meeting street performers again. I’ve been on my laptop too long.

Our design process, clockwise from bottom-left: new tip screens; all our settings pages; cards and navigation; our proposed music overhaul; and a theorised referral and rewards system around our premium accounts.


Thank you to everyone who had faith in our work at the start, to everyone who gave us a go before we were popular, to everyone who’s still here after many years, and to all of you that have shared a kind word about us to your friends and colleagues.

Our latest tip screens, as of July 2024

Here’s to another decade of using the internet for good?

With a lot of love to you all,

Nick