by Caitlin Caven

Matt Wishnow: [Laughs]. I’m totally not a musician at all. I’m just a huge fan. I, you know, I was like a big music-head geek growing up. I never really played any instruments. I had two big passions growing up: one was baseball and the other was punk rock. And I was fairly obsessive about both of them. Even in my house now, it’s like filled with books about baseball statistics and then books about music and post-punk music from X to Y.

…Very simply, [when I started Insound], there were a lot of Internet retail music sites starting, but they were all basically the same exact site—they were all like CD Now or Music Boulevard, or… they were all just a different version of what Amazon was able to kind of swallow. And it seemed really silly to me, because I was like, you know--I’m an indie rock fan. I’m the kind of kid who will put $20 in tin foil, wrap it up, and send it to like a fanzine mail-order company or a 7” mail-order company. I was like, ‘It seems pretty obvious to me that there’s a lot of demand there, but not an efficient distribution for indie rock fans.’ So it was like, what kind of music website would I like? And that’s sort of where the birth of Insound was.

MW: The Internet changed everything. Obviously, I think, for the average music fan, music has kind of changed from being a product that you buy to being content that you are served. That’s why a lot of people, like the average music fan, don’t think they need to pay for music, because they sort of view it the same way they view digital content in general. They just expect it to be there for them.

The average Insound fan is very different than that. We sell more vinyl than we do CDs or mp3s. …40% of our business is vinyl. It’s very heartwarming when I look through orders and see somebody who’s spent $200—you know, that’s like all their disposable income for that month, and they’ve basically saved it up and bought, like, 15 LPs. And I think that is really the same spirit. We see people who’ve bought their 7inches, their quadruple LPs, and they’ve bought a silk-screened poster. I think everything that I liked about the indie music scene and the mail-order business is still very much alive at Insound; it’s just that almost every single thing around it has changed. [Laughs.] …

We’re also playing in a bigger field [now] than we were then. When I first started Insound, the biggest indie rock bands were like Modest Mouse and Yo La Tengo, and they’d sell like 80,000 records. Now the biggest indie rock bands sell a million records. So everything has changed, not necessarily for the worse. It’s not just that consumers are more difficult to understand—which is a challenge sometimes—but the upside is that there’s more interest in indie rock, and there’s more fluid conversation about it.

MW: …Number one, without question, if you ask—not just any audiophile, but anyone who buys records—they’ll tell you that they enjoy listening to vinyl more because there’s “more sound in the sound”. But I think that’s kind of a red herring, that’s not why things are being revitalized.

…For someone like me--if I don’t have the biggest collection of mp3s, what in my life says that I’m an avid music fan? That I love music more than the average person? And I think a lot of people are buying vinyl kind of as a reaction to that. …I think a lot of people are saying, ‘I’m going to draw a line in the sand, and my way of, sort of, painting my life with music is with vinyl and silk-screened posters and that type of stuff.’ Which basically says, ‘I’m more committed to music than the average person.’ I think there’s a big psychology in it, more than I think it has to do with audio quality.

…Then there’s the other obvious part of vinyl, which nothing can make up for. I think psychology is probably 50% of it. At least 40% of it, also, is the artwork and physicality of it. CDs are not ideal products for artwork. A 5-inch square is very small. There’s a lot you can’t do. When you look back at old records and you see how they inserted posters and things…that’s a canvas. 5 inches squared is not a canvas, and attaching a .jpg or .pdf file to an mp3 is not a canvas. …There’s something physical and artful about the LP that people are very attached to—that, as record cover art and that stuff go away, avid music fans want more and more.

MW: We’re a real small company. There’s only 12 of us here. [Judging from the site, people tend to assume] that we must be 40, 50, whatever people—we’re only twelve of us.

I can say this—there’s only one thing that every single person here has in common, and it’s that we’re all obsessive, crazy indie rock fans. So, like, all the staff that’s involved with buying, receiving, and shipping products—they have a meeting once a week, and…every employee is responsible for compiling a list of bands they think Insound should consider carrying. …We do like to keep an eye on unsigned and undistributed bands as well. So they go to the meeting and the buyer makes a decision…

It’s a similar process for how we deal with samplers and other things. We basically say, ok, what’s the purpose of this sampler? Is it about, like, the best bands of 2009, or is it about what we’re listening to now? And we just all throw stuff out there. We put together a list of maybe 20 or 30 bands, and we start contacting them, and seeing who will give us the permission to use [their music].

That is how it worked for Show Support beneficiaries. We basically sat in a room and said, ‘OK. We need to think about bands that are established enough that we know they’re going to tour the country this year’—so they can’t just be the type of band that’s, like, only going to tour like three local cities. So they’re really going to tour, which means they’re going to need money, and they don’t make enough money on the road where it’s, like, really simple for them to tour and they can tour in a fancy bus and stay at hotels. …And the other criteria is that we try to find bands from other parts of the country—not just bands from the same city, to try to…give a little diversity.

Everyone put names of bands on the board, we raised our hands and voted on them…and the first six that made sense and agreed, that was it. [Laughs]

MW: …We plan to switch up the [Show Support] bands every six months, at least. If it starts going better and there’s more demand, we might do it more often than that, but every six months. [Since it started in April,] in November, it’ll be a new batch.

MW: When I first started, the record business was quite healthy—I started in 1998, and the business was really healthy. The indie music business was quite small then, and I viewed it as small…because of challenges related to distribution and promotion. And I saw the Internet as an equalizer—frankly, the Internet has been an equalizer when it comes to promotion and distribution of music for indie bands.

… Right out of college, I started working for marketing and creative services at Elektra records, which was home of some of my favorite records, so I was kind of proud. And I was there for basically two and a half years, and I had a couple of friends who were frankly more entrepreneurial and business-oriented than I was. I sort of had the idea, but they sort of had the—the fearlessness to urge it on, and we basically started Insound in the summer of ’98.

MW: Totally. Which is probably what people want to do.