Tipping Etiquette: Should I Tip My Favourite Band With TipCow.Me?
There’s not a lot of things that people are so divided on as much as the simple act of tipping. No, we don’t mean the act of tilting your fedora when you see a fellow tough guy from the early 1900’s, but the act of paying a bit more for a service to show appreciation to whoever was it that provided the service. While tipping is usual in restaurants, have you even thought about tipping your favourite band? Well, that’s why TipCow.ME for iPhone and Android lets you make it rain for your favourite musician!
Tipping etiquette is a science by itself, in such a large part that there’s even an entire page of Trip Advisor, well, advising you on how, where and how much to tip if you’re in the United States, for example. Even so, you should be able to tip everyone you desire, and that’s what TipCow.ME can help you with, especially when you feel like awarding artists for playing those sweet, sweet tunes.
Tipping musicians is not something new but is something extremely important to their lives and the work they do. If they don’t have enough money to get around with, there’s a high chance that they won’t be able to make music that’s as good as they want it to be.
Tips: Loved Since Forever
If for some reason you’re really into 17th-century history lessons, you’ve really struck gold with this article. 😀 You see, if you’ve ever wondered why do people leave more money to people they don’t know, it all started in the late Tudor England period in, of course, England. There it was expected from travellers that stayed in people’s private homes to provide a sum of money to the host’s servants for, you know, serving them. It proved so popular that soon there was tipping everywhere in London, from coffeehouses to any other commercial establishment.
Of course, even though tipping is a proud and noble tradition born from the not-so-proud tradition of serfdom, you’d be shocked that it wasn’t always welcomed with open arms. The first country that had doubts about this tradition was the United States of America somewhere around 1890. The backlash against tips was so big that there was even an Anti-tipping society of America, and before you start laughing, hear this: it had more than 100,000 members.
Soon, there were anti-tipping laws across the US , but the haters of this proud tradition forgot one small thing.
People. Love. Money. And tipping does have its function.
Still, you perhaps found that with the dawn of new, more technologically advanced times, tipping is still mostly cash-related. It has something to do with the fact that it’s easier to slip a dollar bill into someone’s pocket than a credit card, but it’s also one of the reasons the service industry (and all other tipping-loving industries) are missing out.
As we become increasingly cashless societies like we’ve written about in the case of GreenLight.ME, countries like Sweden have seen the amount of cash and notes its bank hold dramatically decrease – while cashless transactions increase:
What’s The Tipping Etiquette… For Musicians?
As a proper tipping enthusiast, you probably know that there have been a number of solutions for digital tipping, and while they have solved part of the problem for the industry, other parts have been largely ignored. For example, music.
Bands have been struggling to make it for as long as bands were a thing. With the dawn of streaming services things got a little better, and you really can earn by having people stream your music. This isn’t a lot, unfortunately, and you need to get your song heard a whole bunch of times for you to be paid anything more than a few dollars. This calls for the tipping of musicians, which helps local scenes develop, and musicians to survive.
Actually, tipping helps a lot, because, with services like Spotify, you pay a whole bunch of others apart from the band itself, but with apps like TipCow.ME, all of your money (apart from credit card fees) goes to the actual band, so if you tip 5 dollars, they get next to everything you’ve tipped.
To Tip Or Not To Tip?
Because there exists a whole debate we’ve mentioned above, there are also some rather convincing arguments as to why not to tip bands.
On the upside, the band gets the money they need, and you support the real people that play for you, but on the downside, you’ve often bought a ticket, and there’s no need to tip big bands, as they already earn a lot of money. Well, that’s until you hear the story of how Nelly almost got bankrupt and his fans were the ones that helped him by streaming his songs. This only proves that people do like to tip bands, right?
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Still, this only calls for one question, and one question only: is there an app for that? Fortunately for you, dear tipper, there sure is, and the app that will help you tip away wherever you might be is called TipCow.ME, available for iOS and Android. We’re pretty sure the name is a play on cow-tipping, a feat of tipping a real cow over, but no cows were hurt during the writing of this article.
What we do know is that the app allows you to tip live artists while they are playing, and thus reward them for great shows and songs. That’s something the world needs, as we all know a friend who has a band struggling to make it big time. Well, perhaps now they could, with a little help from tipping magic!
TipCow.ME consists of two equally important sides: The web app for artists and the mobile app for fans.
The artist side makes sure there’s an account for the tips to come to, and the public side makes all of the tipping work. They’re both extremely intuitive and well-made, so you won’t have any problems whether you’re listening to someone play, or actually playing music.
How To Get Tips With TipCow.ME
To use the app as a musician, you need to run through a few short steps on your way to stardom:
- Make an account on TipCow.ME;
- Setup your account with your card info, hometown, avatar and at least one social network/website
- Start getting paid!
It’s really not hard at all, and there really are no risks whatsoever. You just download the Android or iOS app and search for the artist you want to tip. After that, it’s all about making it rain by swiping the dollars upon the unsuspecting artists. It doesn’t beat the money gun but comes pretty darn close.
There really is no reason for you not to try this app, either as an artist or a person who follows them. Your few dollars might not mean a lot to you, but you can sure make someone’s day just by showing your appreciation through a small donation.
Tip responsibly, and make it rain!
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