Merge celebrates 20 years

Indie label Merge Records is celebrating its 20th active year in 2009. The long-running label was founded by members of Superchunk and has gone on to issue music from The Arcade Fire, Teenage Fanclub, The Rosebuds, And You Will Know Us by the Trail of Dead, Superchunk, Polvo and many others.

The label founders Spoke to AOL Daily Finance saying:

Yeah, we still think in terms of albums. When we started Merge, the industry at large was already a singles-driven industry because of MTV. So for a while, the major-label approach was to put everything into one single, and then people would have to buy the album. But people started going down this road where they were excited to hear a Britney Spears single but didn’t have to have the album. Whereas with artists on Merge, some songs could be “hits,” but fans wouldn’t think of the songs as replacements for the albums. So you can consume one song at a time, but we don’t think of our records that way.

Check out the interview here.
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