Musicians need to sustain themselves: what is Bandcamp Friday?
The art of streaming has always been a bit of a slippery slope for artists. Sure, many people may get to hear your music and give you a wide range of fans, but that doesn’t always show in your pockets at the end of the day. In an era where most streaming services are paying pennies to artists if they pay them, Bandcamp Friday has been a step in the right direction of serving the musicians first.
Granted, it’s not like artists were making out like bandits before the streaming wars started. They may have been signed to major labels and had a lot of financial backing behind their tours, but does that account for much when a businessman in a cheap suit counts the stacks of cash he’s making off you?
The streaming model may have been a good way to eliminate the money-hungry suits of the world, but the suits were just being replaced with an algorithm. You might see some of your songs climb in streaming numbers whenever they start going viral, but even if you hit a million streams on a certain track, there’s a good chance that you will have enough money to buy less than half of a decent sandwich.
So artists must do the next best thing to make their money’s worth on their songs: touring. Even though they may exhaust themselves day in and day out as they make their way across the world in the hopes that someone’s heard their music, Bandcamp has come to the rescue with Bandcamp Friday.
So, when did Bandcamp Fridays start?
The touring circuit is not the most forgiving place in the world. Every artist usually has a horror story or two about moments when they’ve either become sick on tour or tried to keep everything together despite running on fumes half the time. Life is good as long as the gigs are still rolling in, but what happens when you fast-forward to 2020, and the entire world seems to end for live performances?
Since most musicians spent the early months of the 2020s cooped up in their houses due to the pandemic, Bandcamp Fridays was a way for the site to help pay it forward to their artists. For every artist that was featured on Bandcamp at the time, the company started a policy for certain days where part of their proceeds would be donated to the Bandcamp artists directly, generating more revenue for everyone who was suffering without a proper job in quarantine. It’s nice to see people having their hearts in the right place in light of the pandemic, but it turns out the streaming service was much more generous outside of the international plague.
How have Bandcamp Fridays helped musicians?
Starting off and on throughout the past few years, Bandcamp Fridays usually involve the site taking a massive portion of the revenue directly to record labels or to support specific artists on the site. Whether that’s helping musicians out on the road or generating more profits for their music on-site, every single Bandcamp download from these charity days has counted towards the musician first… eventually raising over $120million for musicians around the world.
Although the process is still in its infancy, artists are still finding ways to work with the new system, including established artists putting songs out on the same day, with the proceeds benefiting various charity organisations. At a time when the idea of making money as a musician feels more and more like a pipe dream, Bandcamp Friday is one of the few events that actually understand the mind-boggling concept that musicians have to sustain themselves.
