It seemed like a nice gesture at the time, if nothing more: As concert tours were getting canceled and festivals postponed indefinitely last spring, the online musicstore Bandcamp announced that, on March 20, 2020, it would waive its commission from any purchases made on the site. Instead of taking its normal 10% to 15% of sales, Bandcamp would pass all the money, minus processing fees, directly to artists.

在那一天,该网站出售价值430万美元的年代ongs, albums and merchandise — more than 15times the amount of a normal Friday.

“We did it, not really knowing how long we were going to do it or what the impact would be,” says Ethan Diamond, co-founder and CEO of the Oakland company, “and the response was huge.”

所以,网站继续。搬到Bandcamp星期五成为一个monthly event. And 13 of those days later, the site had put $56 million into the pockets of musicians from around the world at a time when the artists needed it the most. That money is on top of the $161 million of music and merch bought on other days since March 2020.

While the unofficial indie music holiday will be taking a hiatus for June and July, Bandcamp will be, for the second year in a row, donating all of its proceeds from sales on June 19 (also known as Juneteenth, the day the last of the slaves in the U.S. were freed in Texas) to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund.

Bandcamp Fridays will pick back up on Aug. 6.

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“It’s helped save the neck of an entire generation of American musicians who’ve been left for dead by the government,” says Greg Saunier of San Francisco indie rock veterans Deerhoof. “We can’t make a living off of Bandcamp sales — I mean, I’m not going to mislead you — but we do make some income from it. And that’s obviously pretty helpful for survival.”

It has become an article of faith that, in the 21st century, musicians can’t expect to make any reasonable amount of money from an album release. The money, it is said over and again, is in everything else — touring, merchandise, television and ad placements.

In 2008, Bandcamp wanted to push back against that narrative.

“I thought there (were) going to be a lot of people who would want to directly support artists,” says Diamond, “and where it was clear to you as a music listener that your money was going right to the artist.”

The names, the laws and the mechanisms might have changed over the past 13 years, as illegal downloading became legal streaming, but when the pandemic shut down the live music industry, the need to get bigger sums of money into artists’ pockets became dire. Diamond and the company’s original bet, that fans would still be willing to pay for music if they saw that money go directly to their favorite artists, became a critical part of musicians’ livelihoods in 2020.

Last year, Bandcamp sold $161 million worth of physical albums, MP3s, T-shirtsand other paraphernalia to fans on days apart from Bandcamp Fridays. In total, that meansabout $132 million in artist revenue (an average of 82% of the non-Friday sales reach artists and labels, according to Bandcamp). This is a small amount compared with what PriceWaterhouseCoopers estimates to be a $26 billion live music industry, but with less overhead, it became an important lifeline for some.

How important? Bandcamp Fridays started to affect release calendars. KaregaBailey of Oakland soul collective SOL Development wrote a book, “SOL Affirmations,” and when it came time for a musical accompaniment (part audiobook, part score), he knew exactly when to release it: Dec. 4, 2020, on Bandcamp Friday.

“It’s actually become kind of a staple to the (release schedule) of a lot of artists globally,” Bailey says.

That trend has continued in 2021, with artists big and small. Marc Ribot — a guitarist who has worked with Elvis Costello, the Black Keys and Allen Toussaint,among others — announced that his remastered version of “Marc Ribot Plays Solo Guitar Works of Frantz Casseus” was up for preorder on March 4 for Bandcamp Friday. New Zealand indie-pop foursome the Beths put together a cassette tape filled with demos and rarities as a Bandcamp exclusive on May 7.

It’s become a good business move in part thanks to the direct-to-listener feel of the site. On an individual act’s Bandcamp page, there’s a small company logo in the upper left-hand corner of the page and one in the bottom left. Beyond that, the band chooses what art goes where; some, like SOL Development, use artwork from an album as a banner image, while others like San Francisco shoegaze pop band Seablite makesure to get their namesin as big a type as possible. It’s essentially a digital merchandise stand, where the band can hawk its wares, without the long lines and selfie requests.

“With the way music is bought, soldand experienced now … it’s just like one veil after another is sort of clouding or hiding the (musicians) that were there,” Saunier says. “But the store’s job is to be invisible, and pretend that they’re not there, you know?”

If live music’s return is as close as it seems, the economics of being a musician — and, by extension, being a fan of a musician — may start to slide back toward the previous normal. But if Bandcamp Fridays have one lasting impact, maybe it is reconnecting the ideas of “supporting artists” and “buying music” to a generation that grew up without tangible versions of albums.

“We’ve moved from buying a physical copy of music, to buying a digital copy of music, to now paying for a subscription to a company. You don’t have any connection to the artist at all,” Diamond says. “Something important gets lost, that connection that you have to the artist that makes you feel like, ‘What I’m doing right now is helping to support the creation of more of something that I like.’”

For artists like Bailey, that mentality shift is as much about expanding the idea of support to more than concert tickets or social media posts — as important as both are.

“The entire world had to take a pivot in 2020 and reassess how we support one another, how we show up for the things we say we love, and how to really back that thing with some level of resource,” Bailey says. “It made the listener kind of survey how they show up for the artists. … When they realized that they couldn’t come see us, and couldn’t come experience us, they are learning that this is another way to directly support us.”