Since few years a new kind of label is taking more importance in the whole world of music:
The net labels.
These activities actualy mostly taking part in the electronic kinds of sounds are different from the old styled labels in the sense that all, or only a part of the music they "released" is offered for free on their website.
So the potential listener that would be aware of enough interesting websites could download a lot of music for free.  It's also ways much cheaper for the label to release this kind of albums than to press a pro CD for example (The only things they would need is enough cash to have a society hosting their website... And a bit of free time to update everything).
But, even if it seems to be some kind of utopian dream coming true, several negative points and quite annoying imperfections have to be dissected.

Some of the sites aren't very clear (better said user-friendly) and sometimes you do not really know were you are, or what kind of music you could be trying to download.
The various netlabels I tried do not seem to be that well working, even though some are not 3 months old: Some website do not have a very fast bandwidth, and it could take 10-15 or even 20 minutes to download a single song... This isn't fast enough, especially if you only want to have an idea of how the music sounds, of what kind of music the label could release...

Since it would have almost became free and not much time consuming to release this kind of albums, would the maintainer of the label keep some kind of "Mark of quality"? Since it won't ask him any effort, wouldn't he be tempted to release a bit anything and everything (as long as it sounds cool at the first listening), just to have many releases and seem active? Won't he be easily influenceable concerning the various friend and "new stars"'s requests?
The problem would be many more very average or quite useless music would circulate much more... And it would become ever harder to find something really interesting... And the potential auditors could easily turn bored, even if it's free.

Then we could think about the efficiency of the netlabels. Their music is for free, but if there's not enough promotion (on boards for example) I guess their releases won't match a third of the efficiency 1000 copies of a professional album would have.
We should also keep in mind many peoples download a bit everything, to have an idea of the style, but finally do not listen to most of the Mp3s anymore.
So, some high-pitched downloads statistics would be wrong and blind the eyes of the label-maker concerning the fact more promotion is needed, the fact there might not be even 100 peoples who would keep on listening to their releases, and even only 30 who actually burnt the CDs...

I'm quite afraid about the fast these labels would have problems to release the music of bands who really worked hard, put tears, guts and blood into their songs! I guess for these bands, few Mp3s lost in the immensity of the Internet wouldn't be enough... Especially since the site sounds quite anonymous and do not have 10000 unique visitors each month... So, these labels might tend to release music of a "lesser importance", not so serious subprojects, 2 listenings life-length experimental music... That's the way it could surely happen for the rock and metal kinds of music, not sure of how the electronic kinds considers this, even though the average do not seem to care much about the format.

So the netlabels might be the future of the kind of labels we currently know, but they are not currently developed and efficient enough to take over things material.
I think they would need few years more of experience to develop and turn into something stronger, if that would be any of their will.
Anyway, I think there will always be labels releasing something on CDs, Lps etc... But since few years things are moving so fast concerning these matters, that it's not easy to wisely imagine how things will be in 4 years. Almost uncertainty.