There are 11 lessons to be learned from the life of North Carolina indie giant Merge Records:
1. Empathize with your enemy. Founded by Chapel Hill’s Superchunk, Merge Records came of age as an indie in the 1990s, when indie was, in the popular imagination, meaningless. Despite the grunge-bust of 1994, most bands of the day still saw little point to slow growth, or even to learning how to count higher than four when an A&R glad hander could do it for you. When Superchunk’s then-label Matador was sold to Atlantic, the band wisely jumped ship back to their handmade dinghy. Yet Merge would spend the decade watching its acts flirt with “big time” business and sometimes even attain it on their own terms.
2. Rationality will not save us. In Our Noise, an oral history of Merge Records’ improbable life, there’s an office photograph of a whiteboard list that anyone who’s ever gone into self-employment in the arts will recognize. After several positive-sounding items comes “Item VII: Mirla [Merge’s accountant] says we don’t have any $.”
3. There’s something beyond one’s self. The diversity of Merge’s catalogue speaks to a love of music antithetical to marketing. The post-rock shards of Polvo, the chamber-pop affectations of the Magnetic Fields, the psych-soul country of Lambchop, all sound nothing like Superchunk.
4. Maximize efficiency. Merge didn’t grow its own. Believing in their mission, Touch and Go (the FDR of indie labels) provided them with a production and distribution safety net.
5. Proportionality should be a guideline in war. Most weird music made by ugly people will sell the same amount, regardless of the brand of promotion. After much acrimony with Merge, …And You Will Know Us By the Trail of Dead took the rock star bait, jumped to a major, and released a critically lauded album that sold a “pitiful” 120,000 copies. To Interscope it was a near–contract cancelling performance, but it would have been a success if on Merge.
6. Get the data. Only Merge would have released the Magnetic Fields’ 69 Love Songs in its triple album format but the band still left the label. Claudia Gonson admits that the Magnetic Fields’ post-Merge life on Nonesuch has seen more compromises than expected.
7. Belief and seeing are often both wrong. Can a band be a breakthrough success and stay on an independent label? As Spoon and the Arcade Fire prove, it is possible, especially with the playing field levelled — temporarily — after the digital deluge.
8. Be prepared to re-examine your reasoning. True to their company name, Merge’s story is really several stories folded into one: that of bands learning how to succeed in the post-Cobain world and founders Superchunk struggling to find a place in it all. How beautiful it is that the one band that never fit in — pumping out smart, buzz-saw rock in the age of de rigueur mortis grunge and ending the ’90s with baroque mellowness — helped other bands find audiences.
9. In order to do good, you may have to engage in evil. After the Arcade Fire’s success brought growth headaches and new overhead costs, Merge left its long-standing relationship with Touch and Go and is now distributed by a subsidiary of Warner.
10. Never say never. With the Arcade Fire nominated for a Grammy, Merge’s Mac McCaughan remembers sitting in the audience excited, but leaving after hearing the announcer intone, “And up next, Sting.”
11. You can’t change human nature. Ideals are worthless until tested. Merge has survived on a lot of luck but also on relentless risk-taking inside and outside the definition of “independent.”