Merge Records has heard the news.
The music business is hemorrhaging. Album sales have declined for three consecutive years. Labels are slashing their payrolls, laying off staff and dropping artists. And yet, while much of the music business has been letting blood, this tiny North Carolina label has been beefing up.
Merge employs eight full-time staffers–up from the two who founded the label in a bedroom in 1989–and it operates from its most deluxe accommodations yet: a loft-style space in downtown Durham above a gay resource center.
The label released 18 records last year, more than ever, and had one of its biggest hits in 2002, a year ostensibly plagued by illegal downloading.
To commemorate its 15th anniversary last week, Merge threw itself a five-night bash featuring performances by more than 20 of its artists. Bands such as Spoon and Lambchop and Superchunk may not be household names, but–even with the University of North Carolina students gone for the summer–three of the four paid concerts sold out, with at least 600 fans, some from as far away as Japan and Germany, buying tickets.
In the American independent rock scene, a kind of parallel universe to the big-budget mainstream music business, these bands matter. Within indie rock’s parameters, Merge stands as one of the most prominent labels in the South, admired even by larger cross-country rivals such as Sub Pop, the mythic Seattle indie label that launched Nirvana.
“If there wasn’t a Merge, American pop music just wouldn’t be the same,” says Sub Pop president and co-founder Jonathan Poneman. “And it wouldn’t be the same in some dire, bad, sad ways.”
Merge has never given American pop music an artist of Nirvana’s stature. It hasn’t needed to. By keeping its costs down and locating an audience for smaller, quirkier artists, Merge has become, over the course of 239 releases, the Little Label That Could, a model for financial prudence and artistic relevance in an industry notorious for squandering both.
The label began as the brainchild of Superchunk bandmates Mac McCaughan and former Atlantan Laura Ballance, musicians who studied history (he at Columbia University) and anthropology (she at UNC) rather than attend business school. They had no big aspirations; they simply wanted to put out their–and their friends’–music.
“If in 1989, when we started, our goal was to have national distribution and get a cover story in Rolling Stone, then we’d have given up by now–or by two years later, we would’ve given up,” Ballance says.
“I think the fact that they exist and that they’ve survived is really kind of amazing these days,” says former Talking Heads frontman David Byrne, who covers a Lambchop song on “Grown Backwards,” his new Nonesuch Records CD. “It’s really difficult, and they’ve done really well.”
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Edited by Cara DiPasquale (cdipasquale@tribune.com) and Kris Karnopp (kkarnopp@tribune.com)
