Last Friday, Bandcamp agreed to waive their customary fee for record sales on the platform to encourage people to respond to a #BuyRecords campaign to support their favorite artists and labels.
Did they ever.
In a post, Bandcamp’s Ethan Diamond revealed that fans bought nearly 800,000 items from Bandcamp during the sale, totaling more than $4.3 million in music and merchandise. “That’s more than 15 times our normal Friday,” Diamond wrote. “And at the peak, fans were buying 11 items per second.”
Maybe more importantly, loads of artists who have previously limited themselves to digital platforms like Traxsource and Beatport opened up storefronts on Bandcamp to take advantage of the sale. This is a great development, and here’s hoping they stay, and offer exclusives outside of their releases on other platforms. Bandcamp is one of the few music platforms out there that both claims profitability and publishes their numbers – and for good reason.
And there is little sense for an independent artist or label in 2020 to limit themselves to large platforms that typical take a cut in excess of the 30% established by Apple for digital products simply for “upfront promo” exposure. As the saying goes, people die of exposure. So do labels.
