Fans show up under more than one name in the door of any CRM. A ticket bought as a guest, a gift purchased with a different email, a membership signed up at the box office, and the same person turns into three or four separate records. Merge contacts brings those duplicates back into one profile.

When you merge, every ticket, gift, membership, and message tied to the old records carries forward onto the single profile you keep. Nothing gets dropped to make the list cleaner. You end up with one accurate record per fan, which is what makes marketing, membership tracking, and reporting mean anything.