Insound

» see insound.com as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the goodbye ~

Insound sold records to people who could take delivery of a box from Brooklyn without doing arithmetic first. In 1999 I was on a 33.6k modem in Turkey and American mail order was a shop window, not a shop. The shipping line at checkout was reliably the largest number on the page, and it stayed that way for the whole time Insound existed.

Christian Anthony started it in 1998 with Matt Wishnow and Ari Sass, who had worked together at Elektra. The site took six months to build and opened on 1 March 1999, selling CDs and vinyl alongside the hard-to-find items nobody with a warehouse wanted to bother stocking. That was the entire proposition: a store for the records a store would not carry.

It worked because the store had a voice. Insound ran reviews and zines, promoted bands that were nobody at the time, and put on rooms at CMJ and South by Southwest. Death Cab for Cutie were a small act when Insound was pushing them. The company turned profitable in 2003, which almost no consumer web retailer of its vintage managed, and by 2008 more than half of its revenue came from vinyl, at a point when the industry still treated vinyl as a hobbyist rounding error.

In January 2008 the Alternative Distribution Alliance bought it, which put Insound inside Warner Music Group. Seven years later the same parent decided the line item was not worth carrying. On 19 March 2015 the store posted that after sixteen years of slinging vinyl it was closing at the end of the month due to corporate cost-cutting measures. There was no auction and no rescue. Somebody upstairs ran a spreadsheet.

~ the chronicle ~

~ the long tail ~

The name did not die when the store did. In October 2015, seven months after disbanding it, Warner switched insound.com back on as a discount outlet moving surplus product at cut prices. It was the same domain with none of the reason for the domain. By April 2020 even that stopped and the address began redirecting to the Warner Music Group official store, which is where it points today.

~ what got buried with it ~

What Warner cut was not a checkout. It was the editorial layer: a record-of-the-month club, tour-support EPs pressed in small runs, and staff who wrote about what they were selling. That layer is expensive and it does not show up as revenue against the SKU it moved, so it is always the first thing a parent company finds when it goes looking.

The vinyl revival Insound was early to arrived in full about two years after it was shut. Sales kept climbing every year after 2015 and the buyers went to Discogs and to Bandcamp, both of which are marketplaces rather than shops with an opinion. Insound had spent sixteen years proving the opinion was the product, and it got closed by an owner who had bought it for the inventory.

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