This month online music retailer Insound began selling MP3 albums for the first time. Unlike iTunes and eMusic, however, they will not be selling individual tracks. Insound’s goal is to preserve the integrity of entire records, and have launched a campaign called Save The Album.

If you visit savethealbum.com, you’ll see that a few indie and indie-minded artists have shot “PSAs” in support of the cause. Currently, you can watch clips featuring Colin Meloy (The Decemberists), Bloc Party, The Walkmen, Devendra Banhart, John Darnielle (The Mountain Goats) and Tim Harrington (Les Savy Fav).

Each of these video snippets is pretty raw and could have benefited from some more editing and production value. But to hear some of these artists discuss their favorite records or the importance of the album in this relatively unabridged format does have merit. Colin Meloy’s take on The Pogues Rum, Sodomy and The Lash is definitely informative, and it’s notable that Walkmen guitarist Paul Maroon picked the same LP as his favorite.

As an album preservationist myself, it’s great to see Insound and some artists taking a stand. Every grade I give in an album review is based on the strength of each individual track and the cohesiveness of the album as a whole. Plus, I keep a running tab of the best, most complete albums throughout the year (see Top 20 Albums Standings). So if Insound can afford to fight this fight, I’m all for it.

However, I also believe there’s plenty of room for buying individual tracks online. For my money, somewhere between 20 and 100 complete albums each year (depending on the range of your musical tastes) are worth buying outright. Many releases are only good for a couple tracks. If there’s going to be the death of any kind of album anytime soon, hopefully it’s the ones with a couple highlights and lots of filler. If enough people buy just individual tracks off weak albums, artists will be forced to just put out singles, EPs or god forbid, make better records. In the meantime, I assume (and hope) real artists will keep making quality, full-length statements.