Thread by @future_of_music

December was the last @Bandcamp Friday, a day where the company waived its usual cut of the revenue to pass on more money to artists and rightsholders. Here's a thread with some lessons we can learn. 1/🧵

There's no question that this initiative was successful beyond anyone's expectations. Originally announced as a one-time effort, it was extended to a total of 15 days. Bandcamp reports that fans paid artists/labels $61 million on those 15 days since March 2020. 2/🧵

Do a little math, and you can see the waived rev-share works out to an effective donation by @bandcamp of roughly $7 million. But it's also the case that the initiative helped motivate a lot of music-buying that wouldn't have happened otherwise. 3/🧵

It's also been good business for Bandcamp, which was one of the first digital music services to be profitable; as we've long argued, services can distinguish themselves in the marketplace is by competing to better serve musicians with artist-friendly policies. 4/🧵

In this thread from March 2020, we spelled out some of the reasons that Bandcamp is able to make moves like this while big competitors cannot.

https://twitter.com/future_of_music/status/1240983350648745984

5/🧵

Even with the constraints of their business models, the big services could be doing much more. This article by @jonbern from early in the pandemic is worth revisiting now. rollingstone.com/pro/features/s…

Spotify, for example, donated $10 million to various COVID/music related relief efforts. Which is good, but if the much much smaller Bandcamp can donate $7m, $10m (or roughly .1% of Spotify's annual revenue) doesn't seem that impressive.

Spotify and other big digital services do deserve credit for supporting covid relief legislative efforts and actively working in DC for their passage. But the goodwill generated by this work may be undercut by aggressive moves to pay musicians and songwriters less.

But back to some positive lessons: small companies with business models that aren't focused on mass-audience approaches can still be profoundly impactful. The key is having a close enough relationship with artists themselves to know what is helpful. 9/🧵

So much of the discourse focuses on the biggest artists, biggest labels, biggest services. By focusing our attention on the experiences of individual artists operating at community scale, we can get a more richly textured view of what's happening. 10/🧵

In fact, that's true of the full array of public policy topics that impact musicians, from health care to copyright, from arts funding to competition policy. 11/🧵