by SHANE SINNOTT

We’re going to look back on this time as the one when the established labels ramped up the fight against file-sharing (the shuttering of torrent sites, the successful suing of individuals) and many artists started to circumvent the very system the labels were trying to save. Radiohead’s release of In Rainbows will no doubt be the historical marker, but rumblings of a reconfiguration have been happening for some time now. A good example is Capsule Records (www.capsulerecords.com), an online label started in 2006 by Montrealer Hamza Kubba.

Capsule’s albums cost between $5 and $9, and for that price you get access to an album “capsule”—an MP3 plus artwork etc.—that you can download as many times as you want, from any computer. In a first, by my reckoning, they also display their royalty rates on their Web site: a $3.20 artist payout on the $5 albums, $6.40 payout on the $9 ones, allowing you to easily support local artists for the price of a beer. And unlike almost everybody else in the online music world, Capsule sells full albums only, which is nice to see at a time when we seem to always be within arm’s reach of the net’s giant jukebox.

Radiohead’s rubber stamp of approval of the Capusle-like system, initially skipping the actual manufacture of CDs, has almost ensured that it will be the norm in coming years. What’s unclear, of course, is how record labels are going to make as much money as they used too, and there is going to be much kicking and screaming until that is sorted out. For the record, my vote is for a subscription system, an argument that’s been kicking around for years. Much like cable TV, one should be able to simply subscribe to a record-label package for a monthly fee, which grants unlimited access to everything the label produces. It could be the first step towards a nightmarish future of massive conglomeration, where you pay $50 to Disney for access to all music. I can’t wait.