Today, June 19th, is Juneteenth, and Bandcamp announced that every Juneteenth from here on out, the streaming service will donate their share of each sale to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. Bandcamp is also "allocating an additional $30,000 per year to partner with organizations that fight for racial justice and create opportunities for people of color."
This is in addition to waiving their fees the first Friday of each month between May and July to help bands get back on their feet due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The May Friday netted a collective $7.1 million in sales.
Read Bandcamp's full statement on their blog or below. For those unfamiliar, Juneteenth is the day enslaved African-Americans were told they were free in Texas. This was the final state where slaves were owned, making Juneteeth the day where slavery had ended across the United States completely.
The recent killings of George Floyd, Tony McDade, Sean Reed, Breonna Taylor, Ahmaud Arbery and the ongoing state-sanctioned violence against black people in the US and around the world are horrific tragedies. We stand with those rightfully demanding justice, equality, and change, and people of color everywhere who live with racism every single day, including many of our fellow employees and artists and fans in the Bandcamp community.
So this coming Juneteenth (June 19, from midnight to midnight PDT) and every Juneteenth hereafter, for any purchase you make on Bandcamp, we will be donating 100% of our share of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund, a national organization that has a long history of effectively enacting racial justice and change through litigation, advocacy, and public education. We’re also allocating an additional $30,000 per year to partner with organizations that fight for racial justice and create opportunities for people of color.
The current moment is part of a long-standing, widespread, and entrenched system of structural oppression of people of color, and real progress requires a sustained and sincere commitment to political, social, and economic racial justice and change. We’ll continue to promote diversity and opportunity through our mission to support artists, the products we build to empower them, who we promote through the Bandcamp Daily, our relationships with local artists and organizations through our Oakland space, how we operate as a team, and who and how we hire.
Beyond that, we encourage everyone in the Bandcamp community to look for ways to support racial equality in your own local community, and as a company we’ll continue to look for more opportunities to support racial justice, equality and change.
