London is The World’s Best City For Buskers
Witnessing and embracing the local culture is all part of the travel experience. With that in mind luggage storage experts Radical Storage wanted to discover which cities around the world offer the best busking experience.
To find out Radical Storage analysed data on the top 100 city destinations to uncover the world’s best busking city.
The study used data from The Busking Project, city governments and Twitter to list the number of buskers in each of the top 103 busking locations in the world, alongside the number of busking genres in each city, permit data, the number of positive and negative tweets about busking in the area and the overall Twitter sentiment.
Key Findings
London is the best city in the world for buskers scoring 804 out of a possible 1,000 points in our index, the most out of all busking cities analysed.
Melbourne and Toronto take second and third place for the best busking cities in the world.
With 372 acts on The Busking Project, London takes the top spot for the city with the most buskers and the best variety of buskers with an average of 13 genres of acts to choose from.
Musician is the most popular busking genre with 1,694 acts (67.41%) across the 103 cities analysed.
Twitter sentiment analysis of 42,623 tweets about busking and street performance from the past five years, shows that Santa Monica is the city where people are the most positive about buskers, with 76.14% of the 1,073 tweets analysed being positive.
The world’s best busking cities
To create the busking index, data from 103 famous busking locations were analysed in the world’s most popular cities. The index reviewed:
Number of buskers
Number of busking genres
Permit data
Number of positive tweets about busking in each city
Overall Twitter sentiment
Using the data from the study on behalf of Radical Storage, points for each datapoint were allocated to each city to determine which ones ranked best overall. Here is the top 10 list of the best busking cities in the world.
The World’s Top 10 Cities For Busking
Rank
City
Country
Number of buskers
Number of busking genres
Permit needed?
Positive tweets
Overall score out of 1,000
1
London
England
372
13
Yes
42.88%
804
2
Melbourne
Australia
223
12
Yes
41.43%
747
3
Toronto
Canada
117
12
Yes
45.93%
717
4
New York
United States
101
10
Yes
32.89%
669
5
Berlin
Germany
77
12
Yes
36.23%
662
6
Dublin
Republic of Ireland
40
7
Yes
45.94%
644
7
Vancouver
Canada
138
11
Yes
41.08%
637
8
Boston
United States
36
9
Yes
47.22%
624
9
Sydney
Australia
137
9
Yes
38.68%
623
10
Auckland
New Zealand
28
7
Yes
55.00%
586
London, England took the top spot as the best busking city in the world scoring 804 out of a possible 1,000 points. The analysis found that the capital city has the highest number of buskers available of the 103 cities we analysed using data from The Busking Project.
With 373 buskers, and 13 different genres to choose from, locals and tourists are spoilt for choice.
Permits are required for street performance in London ensuring the quality of those taking to the streets to entertain their audiences. When studying tweets that mentioned London and busking or street performance from the last five years it was found that 42.88% of the 8,226 tweets were positive and 57.12% negative.
In second place is Melbourne, Australia which has 223 buskers across the city over 12 different genres. Toronto, Canada top third place in the ranking with 117 buskers on The Busking Project and 12 different busking categories to choose from.
Cities with the most buskers
The analysis found that London is the city to visit to see the highest number of buskers performing at 372 acts over 13 different genres.
With locations like Covent Garden, Piccadilly Circus, South Bank and the Underground synonymous with street performance it’s easy to see why it came up top.
Melbourne is known for being one of the liveliest cities in the world so it’s no surprise that this diverse city has taken second place in the ranking for places like Bourke Street Mall and Southbank.
Famous for its exciting atmosphere, greenspace and soaring skyscrapers, Toronto is one of the most multicultural cities in Canada. Toronto takes third place in our global index for their busking community for performances in locations like the Eaton Centre department store.
All cities in the top 10 list locations above require buskers to apply for permits to perform, awarding them with 150 points each in the busking index.
The world’s most popular busking genres
London was found to be the most popular destination for buskers, featured in 10 of the top 13 genres. Most musical, circus, artistic, magic, clown and theater acts were located in London.
However, Toronto was highlighted as the top city for juggling acts. New York was shown to be the city to visit to experience dancing excellence and Edinburgh, home to the Edinburgh Fringe Festival came out on top for storytelling.
Which cities like busking the most?
A sentiment analysis algorithm was used to determine which of the 103 cities analysed have the most positive tweets online.
The study of 42,623 tweets about busking and street performance in key cities from the past five years, showed that Santa Monica, United States has the most positive tweets of all 103 cities scoring 471 out of a possible 550 points.
Overall, 76.14% of the 1,073 posts about busking and street performance in Santa Monica are positive with only 23.86% being negative towards the activity. This gives the city an overall sentiment score of 0.69. A sentiment score over 0.50 is viewed as positive and anything below 0.50 is classed as negative.
Geelong, Australia took 2nd place with a sentiment score of 0.59 and 389 points, followed by Bath, England with 367 out of the full 550 points available. The top cities with the highest sentiment
Nashville, United States has the lowest sentiment score of all the cities, at -0.16 but scored points for number of tweets (2,338), with 17.39% being positive and sadly 82.61% being negative about busking in the city resulting in a score of 298 out of 550 points.
