readyforbusking

Busking in Innsbruck

After the bad experiance in Salzburg we were a bit sceptical about playing in Innsbruck. And we also heard that you might have to pay a lot for the permit... In the end there was no reason to worry about. It was one of the best cities in Austria, we have ever played! :)

Innsbruck

Laws:
You have to get a permission to play in the city and you have to pay some money for it. We got different kind of information about the amount they ask(the police said that it's not much but another guy said it can be over 15 euros... which is a lot). Also you can play in a place for half an hour than you have to change your spot to another. It is not allowed to play in front of "the golden roof" (the main attraction in Innsbruck).

Little passage

Our experiance:
We were a bit afraid of hitchhiking, because we've never done it before in Austria and we heard very mixed stories also. But we tried it anyway and it was really easy. We had to wait for 20-30 minutes and a car stopped which took us all the way to Innsbruck. We might have been just lucky.

Since the last week we didn't make too much  money we decided to play without a permit and let the police inform us first. We didn't see anybody playing on the street, so we didn't have competition at all. But we know that there are some buskers in town that usually play in Innsbruck.

Town square

Innsbruck was a great place for us! In the city there are many passages with a really great acoustic. And there are many other possible spots to play. We played in two of the passages and both of them were great! Although from one of them the police sent us away when they passed by car because we didn't have the permit. They were nice and they gave us the address where we could get the permit.  But we couldn't really get it because it was already weekend and the office was closed so we played anyway.

places for busking:

• Town square (for bands or loud instruments)
• Burggraben (as we heard a lot of people play in front of the terrace but we played in the passage)
• Museumstrasse (we are quite sceptical about this place because it's very noisy, but the police told us this place as an example)
• maybe the smaller streets can be good also but the shops are really close to each other and the people working there can get easily annoyed. Also if you play without a permit it might not be the best place. The police checks it more frequently
• railway passage (it's not attractive at all(i mean how it looks), but the acoustic is great! Locals use it but they apprechiate good music)
• and probably there are more spots that can be good but we don't know about

So for us Innsbruck was great in any kind of weather condition and we left the city with full pockets :)