Success Quote by Greg Ginn

In Greg Ginn's world, the “fan base” isn’t a warm blanket; it’s a trap. Coming from the guitarist who built SST Records into a DIY lifeline for American punk and indie, this is less business advice than a survival ethic: don’t assume loyalty, don’t assume a market, don’t assume yesterday’s crowd will show up for tomorrow’s left turn. Treating “every group and every record as a unique entity” is a refusal of the assembly line model major labels perfected, where branding does the work and artists become product extensions.

The intent is practical and slightly combative. Ginn is defending an approach that looks messy on paper: a catalog that jumps from hardcore (Black Flag) to eclectic outsider rock (Minutemen) to noisy experimentation (Sonic Youth’s early footholds, Dinosaur Jr. distribution). The subtext is that scenes are fickle and authenticity is perishable; if you try to “rely upon a fan base,” you start programming your releases to satisfy a demographic instead of documenting an impulse. Punk’s promise was always movement, not stability.

It also reveals a label head’s real job: not cultivating fandom like a garden, but earning attention over and over by taking each release seriously on its own terms. The irony is that this strategy is exactly how you end up creating a fan base anyway: not by pandering to one, but by building a reputation for risk. Ginn frames success as repetition without complacency, a catalog that keeps refusing to become a brand.