A couple of weeks ago Maansun opened. It’s a well-curated online store for Korean independent digital contents and although the catalogue is currently small I found it very impressive. Eager to learn more about this new venture I reached out to the team behind Maansun with a few questions.

Why was Maansun created?

Listening to music is very cheap and easy these days. This new distribution system with streaming services might work well for the mainstream industry, but not for most indie musicians, especially in Korea.

We thought it makes more sense that we open our own store and invite an audience sharing a certain taste and sensibility. We will try to remain as a small local store that musicians can benefit from more than giant platforms.

 
How were the first items in the catalogue picked?

We are featuring 7 musicians now. It’s not a long list. But our catalogue items are pretty rare. Most of them have never been released online before.

I’ve been not only a fan, but friends with these musicians for a long time. We’ve shared a mutual trust with each other. I’m very thankful that they provided their records to a newborn service.

 
Which other types of contents do you hope to add to the store?

Although we’ll try to keep our catalogue as refined as possible, we are planning to feature books, paintings and design goods around the scene as well as music. We hope maansun grows to be one of the places which people who are looking for Korean alternative music and culture visit first.

 
Do you have any other plans in mind for Maansun that you could share already now?

We have pretty exciting list of artists working on their new stuff. Making more people enjoy them. That’s the first and probably the only thing on our To-Do list.

Personally I’m very much looking forward to seeing what else Maansun will be offering in the future. When the store launched I immediately picked up a bunch of Byul.org‘s Monthly Vampire numbers that I missed when they were first published. For sure I’ll do more shopping once new items are added, and I might even get a few of the music releases I already have–both for the convenience of having them in digital format and out of curiousity for what the extra material that comes with some of them might be.

In addition to Byul.org, the store currently offers releases from Bulssazo, Wedance, Underwears Band, Jowall, Kuang Program, and Choi Taehyun.