Merge Records co-founder Laura Ballance explains how independent record labels have maintained financial sustainability during the transition to streaming.
What-if
Ballance: Merge Records could not have succeeded without Superchunk
“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.”
Insight
Ballance: Merge Records survived by growing slowly and avoiding big goals
“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.”
What-if
Ballance: Merge Records would not have survived with two Mac McCaughans
“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.”
Opinion
Ballance: Raleigh punk was hardcore while Chapel Hill was poppy punk
“The kids in Raleigh seemed, like, more serious and more into the kind of, like, more menacing side of punk rock or something, and the Chapel Hill kids seemed to be more goofy. Like, Raleigh was more hardcore to me, and Chapel Hill was more, like, poppy punk.”
Disclosure
Merge Records launched artist roster using handshake profit-split deals
“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 …”
Insight
Ballance: Fan attachment makes walking away from creative projects much harder
“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.”