The Ledger
Every statement that passed quotation and attribution checks. Mix any filter with any other: certainty 1/5, debate potential 5/5, or both at once.
why aren't all 12 resolved? a statement only gets an assessment when the public record can support or contradict it. opinions and what-ifs never can, and 0 checkable ones are still open, waiting for their date. predictions held up or didn't; assertions are supported or contradicted. on every card: ▮▮▮▮▮ certainty · ▮▮▮▮▮ debate potential. speakers are clickable
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.”
Ballance: Vinyl resurgence heavily supports artists, labels, and record stores
“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…”
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.”
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.”
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.”
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 …”
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.”
Arcade Fire almost signed a Canadian record deal before choosing Merge
“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.”
Ballance: Merge initially expected Arcade Fire's 'Funeral' to sell 4,000 copies
“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.”
Ballance would have refused to start Merge if she knew its scale
“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.”
Ballance: Naming a band or new project always sounds stupid initially
“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…”
Ballance: Merge and Superchunk were bigger than their founders' romantic relationship
“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…”