Starting from this morning at 8am, over the next 24 hours Bandcamp are donating their cut of sales to the NAACP Legal Defense Fund. The move comes off the back of a similar initiative the site has already undertaken several times this year, in which their share of revenue (15% of digital sales and 10% of merchandise) was given straight to the artist in an effort to support independent musicians during lockdown.
In today’s feature on the site’s editorial arm Bandcamp Daily, Co-founder and CEO Ethan Diamond referred to the recent killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and Ahmaud Arbery among others as “state-sanctioned violence”, and declared that the company stood “with those rightfully demanding justice, equality, and change”.
This Friday we are donating our share of sales to @NAACP_LDF to support racial justice, equality and change: https://t.co/FVgnE0FuDC pic.twitter.com/PN9w1eL6We
— bandcamp (@Bandcamp) June 15, 2020
“Real progress”, he continued, “requires a sustained and sincere commitment to political, social, and economic racial justice”. As evidence of the sincerity in this statement, Diamond has promised that the NAACP Legal Defense fund will receive his company’s share of sales for every 19th of June hereafter. In addition, Bandcamp have pledged to set aside an annual budget of $30,000 for organisations that “fight for racial justice and create opportunities for people of colour”.
The significance of the 19th of June, often referred to as ‘Juneteenth’, stems from it being the date the day of emancipation for the last enslaved African Americans in the Confederacy in 1865, two and a half years after Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation. While the date has been celebrated by America’s black community for over a century, President Trump recently claimed in a delusionary interview with the Wall Street Journal to be responsible for the tradition catching on, despite originally planning to hold his first rally since the beginning of the coronavirus pandemic on that date. Unlike the highly contentious Columbus Day, the US does not officially celebrate the 19th of June as a national holiday, however in the wake of the current Black Lives Matter protests more and more corporations are embracing it as a paid holiday.
