'When we started, we had no expectations,' says Laura Ballance, co-founder of the North Carolina-based independent record label Merge Records and bassist for the scrappy indie rock band Superchunk. 'It was a punk rock hobby. We didn't think it was going to be a successful business.'
Merge celebrates its success every five years with a multiday festival in Durham, N.C. This year's milestone observance, called MRG30, will take place July 24-27 and features headliners Fucked Up, Destroyer, Waxahatchee and more. Attendance is capped at 750 so that everyone can fit inside Cat's Cradle, the Durham venue where most of the sets are located. "It's kind of like going to summer camp for a week," says Ballance.
Superchunk -- which generated enough earnings for McCaughan and Ballance to live on until around 2000 -- put out its first three albums on Matador Records, leaving once Merge had grown to the point where the band felt it could release its fourth LP,, on the label. "At first, Superchunk definitely took up a lot more time than Merge," says Ballance. "But in a lot of ways, the band helped to grow the label.
As we gradually move away from downloads and toward streaming, we are going back to the '80s in a lot of ways financially. A lot of us got really spoiled by how great and easy it was to make money. For a while there, artists were actually able to make a living after putting out a record, and that's much harder right now, but that expectation is still there that they should be able to. If bands feel like their income is compressing, they blame us.
We are always willing to invest and take time to develop an artist and support them, even if records don't do well right away. Something I'm struggling with recently is, we've always done these really artist-friendly deals -- with an expiration date -- and most other indie labels at this point are doing perpetuity deals. As an artist myself, I never felt like that was an ethical thing to do.
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