(KEY WEST) It's been brewing since last year when regulations for street-performing were brought up in City Hall. Now, a tourist was recently bitten on the face by a performer's lemur which has triggered a new law requiring entertainers to have a minimum of $300,000 of liability insurance.

The law was designed to bring street entertainers in line with other groups, such as taxis, pedicabs and street food vendors, all of whom are required to have similar liability policies.

Restrictions where you can perform were placed on Duval Street but not past Petronia. The first two blocks of Whitehead and other "pitch" restrictions also go into effect. The yearly permit was raised from $100 to $150 and if there's is a festival going on, no performing is allowed. Performer's insurance is available on the...

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(ST. LOUIS) Remember collecting baseball cards as a kid? Now you can collect busker trading cards of all the wonderful street-performers in St. Louis.Thanks to Board Bill #181, busking and street-performing is now legal in St. Louis. They are now buskers to be memorabilia-ized! And collected! And traded!

It all came about when the city raised the busker fee in order to monitor buskers. Huh? That's exactly what buskers Fred Walker and Nick Pence said - along with the ACLU when it heard of such a preposterous notion.

Now that a wrong has been righted and the laughter has subsided, the buskers may be memoralized as a collector's card. The busker game includes finding each artist performing and having them sign their card. The winner gets featured in an upcoming street-performer festival.

It's a fun idea....

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(from the You've got-to-be-kidding-me Department)
One of the themes of 2009 was that collection societies around the world went nuts trying to charge for anything they possibly could while also trying to increase the rates they could charge. Even banks went wild with their hidden charges.

Remember how one collection society wanted to charge a woman because she put on music in public for her horses? Or how about the woman who worked in a grocery store who was told to stop singing while stocking the shelves or the store would have to pay a performance fee? And, of course, we had ASCAP trying to claim that ringtones were public performances, and mobile operators needed to pay up -- beyond the license fee that was already paid on the recording.

SOCAN, the Society of Composers, Authors and Music Publishers of Canada, has been no exception pushing for drastically increased rates...

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http://eepurl.com/bbhUA9

(WWW) Before the advent of the internet, buskers had to figure out which songs were popular enough to perform in public. Now, we can simply surf the net and and learn in a matter of seconds.Of course, sprinkling the list with an original here and there is always an option. But it all depends on the pitch and audience. Some songs are drunken sing-alongs and others are thoughtful hits. One thing most have in common is a upbeat rhythm.

Two lists we've found cover the "best" songs to play. One list has 31 recommendations and the other has a top 7.


TOP 7:

1. Friends in low places
2. Summer of '69
3. Sweet Caroline
4. 3a.m.
5. When I come around
6. Free Fallin'
7. Livin' on a Prayer

These are mostly 1990's songs that tend to go over well. However, the seasoned busker will have at least one song by the Beatles...

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