Online music retailer Insound is set to launch its first digital store this week, hoping that its unique approach to download sales will lure indie music fans.

In doing so, the seven-year-old online seller of music on CDs and vinyl hopes to "elevate the album and raise it up" by selling music as full albums only, according to company president Matt Wishnow. The store will sell only full albums in MP3 format, a stark departure from the iTunes-dominated, singles-driven business that applies restrictions to what downloaders can do with the music they purchase.

"Digital distribution implicitly has the potential to devalue music as a product," Wishnow told MP3.com today. "Most artists don't record individual tracks just to be released that way. Once you start pricing songs at 99 cents apiece, it's a slippery slope from there for music fans to start looking for places to get music for free."

Wishnow said he is fully aware of some fans' argument that the album has been devalued in recent years by the heavy emphasis on singles that ended up including "a bunch of filler" on full-length albums.

"But in the indie world, that hasn't been the case," Wishnow said. "Artists are still focusing on making quality albums. As long as artists record albums, that's what we want to sell."

To emphasize that point, Insound is promoting a "Save the Album" ad campaign with videos of artists like Devendra Banhart, Bloc Party, and the Decemberists' Colin Meloy talk about their favorite albums.

Insound, based in New York City with 12 employees, will go live later this week with 2,000 catalog albums, and will begin offering new releases starting next week. Another 2,000 albums will be added within the next two weeks, Wishnow said. Catalog albums will sell for $8.99 apiece, with new releases selling for $9.99 each. Insound will sell EPs as well, at variable pricing.

Insound's move into download sales takes a different approach from eMusic, the indie-centric download store that has grown itself into the world's No. 2 digital store in market share behind iTunes with its subscription-based business model. eMusic charges $10 per month for 40 downloads in MP3 format.

eMusic CEO David Pakman said Insound wasn't yet on his radar screen.

"Their market share online seems to be so low such that they don't even appear in the market share statistics for online music sales (physical or digital), so I doubt their digital music efforts will have very much effect on the market," he said in an e-mail.

But Wishnow is confident his company can make a mark on the digital landscape. He says Insound is already in negotiations with some major labels to allow the indie labels they distribute to sign on to the service.

"There is a lot of internal pressure from the affiliated label to open up distribution," he said.

Wishnow also said he wouldn't rule out a move into the subscription business, but said guaranteed it would be unlike anything the major subscriptions services like eMusic, Napster, or Rhapsody offer now.

"A subscription service for us would probably incorporate 7-inch [vinyl] releases, fanzines, and merchandising--it would be more like a record club than the subscription services that exist now," Wishnow said.