Merge Records

“But, you know, I think something else that has helped in the last seven to 10 years has been vinyl coming back. I wonder how many of these vinyl records are actually being listened to sometimes, but like, that is helping a lot to support artists and record lab…”

“They were handshake deals. We didn't do agreements. We sort of based on, How we dealt with bands on how Touch and Go did. You know, what Corey did was a profit split, and so we thought that seemed fair, and so that's what we did with the bands that we started …”

“I think the success of both Superchunk and Merge, they're codependent. One fed the other. We couldn't have just started Merge by itself without Superchunk also. And be where we are now.”

“If I had thought that it was going to turn into what it is now, or that that was the goal, I would have said, no, I don't want to do that. That sounds like too much work. No way.”

“The good thing is you can often tell within 30 seconds or so whether this is going to be something that you're into or not, you know. Sometimes without even listening to it from the way it's being presented to you can tell, so you're not literally listening to…”

“I felt like what we had built with Superchunk and Merge was larger than us at the, at this moment when we were splitting up personally. You know, like, it was, it felt like it had, Merge and Superchunk both had a life of their own in a way, and like, us not be…”

“I mean, our assumption, I think, to this day is that if we're doing a good job, then why wouldn't you want to do another record with us? Though we do use contracts now, but we were taking the handshake deal model from labels like Touch and Go and Discord and l…”

“I think this is gonna, this record's gonna be really, it's gonna do really well. It's gonna sell at least 4000 copies.”

“When we finally reached out to the band, apparently they were on the verge of signing a contract with a Canadian label. And they got out of it and wound up on merge.”

“We fulfill different parts of what the business needs to succeed, and I suspect if you had two Macs running Merge, Merge wouldn't have Kept going.”

“From the artist relations side, bands are more open to working with the label, knowing that The people running the label are also in a band.”

“Like, it's a responsibility that is hard to put down, you know? Once you start doing it, and you realize that other people are attached to it, it's harder to think about just deciding to do something else.”

“Naming anything is terrible. It's hard, and when you first name it has the meaning of the word, and then over time, it loses the meaning of the word, and becomes just a word. It's the same with naming your band. Anything you say for a name for your band sounds…”

“After we put out the first Arcade Fire album, more than one booking agent called and said, you know, I could have booked that band. I had that CD sitting in a stack of demos on my desk, and I just never listened to it.”

“We go into things trying to keep a rein on, you know, how much money we're spending, because it's the band's money, too, you know? And so, for better or worse, that does put us in a position of not having made the 50,000 records that we could have sold from th…”

“I thought of a label as the kind of aesthetic umbrella of, like, a certain group of artists. In other words, like, when I thought of record labels, I thought of For AD, or Sub Pop, or Discord, or Teen Beat Records. Like, they each had their own kind of voice”

“I think that our strategy has always been to be careful and grow slowly, and we've never had big goals on the long term, and I think that has served us well in a way, because we, we've been cautious enough to avoid, in general, overextending ourselves.”

“We borrowed money from friends and family almost on, like, a per-release basis.”