After years of taking money from loyal customers and new fans without delivering any or all of the order, interpunk is finally offline.
- If you haven't already filed a chargeback with your credit card company, you should consider doing so immediately.
- You may also want to contact about cancelling or changing your credit card number; you should at least keep an eye out for unauthorized charges.
- If you had store credit or rewards points, you are unlikely to redeem any of it.
- Same story if interpunk distributed your music: you will probably not receive any due royalties or leftover stock.
Interpunk was once an online oasis of punk and other underground music, from top-selling independent labels and artists, down to obscure Scandinavian cult bands or a DIY record company that started in Bloomington, IL. Non-mainstream music buyers were wary of ordering from the back pages of zines and musicians were weary of dealing with consignment & distros, much of which proved untrustworthy. By allowing any outsider with some CDs, records, tapes, shirts and/or stickers to sell them through their site, and actually paying out the artists when the items were successfully delivered to the people who ordered them, interpunk became one of the biggest and best alternative music sources on the internet.
All of that changed at some hard-to-pinpoint time during the 2010s. The site began selling such un-punk items as lava lamps, Grateful Dead Jerry Garcia mini-guitar replicas, US military air fresheners, a book about Michael Jackson songs, and NKOTB, TLC & Boyz II Men funkos. While none of that may be a crime against anything other than punk sensibility, selling unauthorized bootleg merchandise of the bands that built interpunk's base was definitely against the ethos and the law. So was not paying out to artists and labels for sold consignments and/or not returning unsold stock (even when return postage had been paid). Equally illegal was not fulfilling orders, not responding to those customers' inquiries...then icing the cake by using clients' credit card numbers for unauthorized purchases from third-party sites.
In addition to numerous negative reviews and consumer complaints, there's some web lore involving pigeons, heroin and some sort of mental issue(s) with one of the founders of interpunk, who was rumored to be the sole-proprietor at its end. The owner was reportedly deceased as of late 2024 and interpunk.com is no longer online.
