Musicians pulled in $4.3M after Bandcamp waived revenue shares for 24 hours

Last week, popular music platform Bandcamp announced that it would be waiving its revenue shares from all sales for 24 hours, starting Friday morning. The move was an effort to help boost income for the innumerable artists who have been struggling to make ends meet as live performances have been canceled for the foreseeable future for artists all over the world.

Things went well.

Friday turned out to be the biggest day for sales in the platform’s 11-year history. Artists raised $4.3 million in music and merchandise sales over the 24-hour period. That comes out to more than 15x Bandcamp’s normal numbers on a Friday — or, as the site puts, it 11 items per second over the course of the day. In all, some 800,000 items were sold, versus the standard 47,000.

In addition to Bandcamp waiving its fees, dozens of labels, including Anti-, Fat Possum, Merge, Polyvinyl, Saddle Creek and Sub Pop, gave up 100% of their revenues to artists on Friday.

It’s a nice little bit of news for creatives, many of whom are already struggling to adapt to an ever-changing online economy. Still, it’s hard to say what the future looks like with so many artists stuck at home indefinitely.