Here's a behind-the-scenes seismic shift in the indie music landscape: Merge Records is selling a 50% stake to the founders of Secretly Group, and Merge co-founder Laura Ballance is getting out of the game.
Ballance and her Superchunk bandmate Mac McCaughan started Merge in 1989, inspired by a visit to the Sub Pop office in Seattle on a cross-country road trip. What began as a venue for releasing music from their local pals around Chapel Hill, Durham, and Raleigh grew into one of the most important labels in indie rock history, home to culture-shifting classics from the likes of Neutral Milk Hotel, the Magnetic Fields, Spoon, Arcade Fire, and many more. If you're an indie rock fan and haven't read Our Noise, the Merge oral history McCaughan and Ballance published with John Cook in 2009, you definitely should.
Taking over Ballance's stake in Merge will be Ben Swanson, Chris Swanson, Darius Van Arman, and Phil Waldorf. These are guys with their own storied history. The Swanson brothers co-founded Secretly Canadian with Eric Weddle and Jonathan Cargill in Bloomington, IN in 1996. When Weddle left in 1999, Secretly teamed up with Van Arman's fledgling Jagjaguwar label, and the two sister companies became flourishing fixtures of the underground. In 2007, Waldorf, who had previously managed Misra Records, joined forces with Secretly and Jagjaguwar to launch a third label, Dead Oceans. If you're familiar with any of those labels, you know they loom large within indie music's past and present. The organization that became known as Secretly Group has since added the reissue-focused Numero Group. It also maintains a distribution arm called Secretly Distribution, which has worked with Merge on international distribution since 2013.
While the quartet of Secretly co-founders are coming on board and Ballance is exiting, McCaughan will continue as label president and head of A&R. Merge's longtime label director Christina Rentz will also remain and will still oversee the label's day-to-day operations. Merge marketing director Jamie Beck and head of digital Wilson Fuller are also sticking around. Per Secretly's Ben Swanson, "Our aim is to support Merge with the independent ecosystem we’ve built at Secretly, while preserving what’s truly special about what Mac and Laura have built over the past 36 years, such that we can support Merge’s growth in the decades to come."
Ballance, a self-described introvert, has kept a lower profile than McCaughan over the years, and she stopped touring with Superchunk in 2013 due to worsening hyperacusis. Now, with this deal, she's stepping away from the business that has consumed her life for 36 years. She shared this statement:
It was never my goal to start a record label when I was 21 and run it for the rest of my life. I have been doing this for 36 years now. Life is short. There are other things I have always wanted to do: make more art, travel for fun, volunteer more, write a book and lots of other things that being so entrenched in running a business does not allow me to do. Merge Records started as a literal bedroom label, in my bedroom, and lived there for a few years before we were able to give it some space of its own. It has always been a labor of love. I am going to miss it and all the people and bands tremendously.
McCaughan has a statement too:
We continue to be inspired and amazed by the musicians we work with. I have known many of the people in the Secretly world for decades, and I know that they share Merge's dedication to artists and getting their music into the hands of as many people as possible. We have seen this in action working with Secretly Distribution’s international team since 2012, and are excited about what the future looks like with the strength and experience of Secretly Distribution working for Merge artists around the world, and now here at home. I know Laura has her own exciting future ahead, and I am excited to continue and expand upon the label we’ve run for 36 years.
And here's one from Secretly's Phil Waldorf:
When we heard that Laura was looking to move on from Merge, we immediately engaged in conversations with Mac and Laura about what a new partnership with Secretly could look like. We looked up to Merge as we started our labels. We are not just fans of the music they’ve released, but their independent ethos and commitment to being an artist-first company. Becoming a partner in Merge is beyond a dream for me – I saw Superchunk for the first time when I was a teenager, before I even knew you could have a full-time job in independent music, and attended Merge’s 5th Anniversary celebration at the Cat's Cradle while I was a college student in Athens, GA, making this a real "pinch me" moment three decades later.
These kinds of (ahem) mergers are not uncommon within the world of Big Indie. Beggars Group, for instance, is an alignment of 4AD, Matador, Rough Trade, XL, and Young. But this is still a pretty wild development. Congrats to Ballance for going out on her own terms, and to McCaughan for finding a way to keep this thing humming along.
