Rolling Stone magazine will begin charging for online access today with the launch of its redesigned website, which includes its entire 43-year print archive.

The magazine’s all access paywall comes in three sizes, with single month subscriptions for $3.95, yearly access for $30 or a two-year subscription for $45.

Rolling Stone’s home page, which features celebrity news, photographs and blogs, will remain free, with well-placed reminders for users to sign up for subscriptions.

Those who pay for access will automatically get a free print subscription anyways, as well as exclusive access to two new programmes, one featuring movie reviews from film critic Peter Travers and an in-studio concert series, Live at RS.

Steven Schwartz, chief digital officer of Wenner Media, the parent of Rolling Stone, said: “This is not a case of putting something that existed online behind a paywall, because we’ve never offered access to our archives on the web before.”

Schwartz told paidContent: “We’ll continue to offer a lot of content for free. We have web editors who produce online-only content. For the most part, we recognize the differences in the platforms. It’s not pulling things back.”

Publishers will be watching Rolling Stone closely, curious to see if charging for content is the only way to sustain expensive, high-quality journalism or if it will drive readers towards its rivals, like the free access websites Pitchfork or Stereogum.

According to comScore, RollingStone.com had about 1.3m unique visitors in March with 9m page views, while Pitchfork had 906,000 visitors but 19m page views.

Schwartz said despite 20% fewer print ad pages than the year before the magazine was still profitable, with an average circulation of 1.5m in 2009, up from 1.3m in 2000.