As I am sure many of you know, a very large, international site sharing audio files among audiophiles was shut down yesterday. The founder of oink.cd, as it was called, was arrested after a two year sting involving as intense a legal organization as INTERPOL. The news is making the 24-year-old founder out to be the music industry equivalent of a drug lord, the epicenter of a crime ring that boasted the “largest collection of illegal pre-release recordings” in the world. Because the site took donations from its members (not, as some media outlets are reporting, subscription fees for use) which were used to maintain the servers and support the site– not to let the guy get rich. In fact, because the site was invite only, had very stringent rules, and required its members to be the evangelicals who brought new members in, I would like to propose an entirely different metaphor than the drug lord who doesn’t care who is buying, selling, or using his drugs.

The founder of Oink is not the music industry’s Pablo Escobar, but its Martin Luther, and Oink was nailing his 95 Theses to the door of big music’s church.

Stay with me now, I know this is heavy.

For those who aren’t aware of this fact, people who download music are not evil, hateful human beings dead set on ending music production and sending musicians to the streets to starve. We love music. Period. For many of us, that love is something spiritual, religious, and transcendent. Standing between those of us who are acolytes to this beauty, this word handed down to us by the various gods and goddesses of pop music is the Church of the Record Industry. It is the industry that tells us that we are starving our gods, that we worship them incorrectly, but in truth, it is only the Church of the Record Industry that is being starved. While musicians who, five, ten years ago would have been incapable of reaching an international audience at all are now selling out enormous shows in countries to which they’ve never been and more creative, experimental, and, dare I say it, better music is spread through out the world via blogs, these heads of industry claim that we are starving the musicians.

WRONG.

We are going to more concerts. We are loving more bands. We are making it possible for hard-working, talented musicians to do what they love instead of reaching middle age as the guys who play occasionally down the local bar while their wives are at home babysitting the kids. In this time where no one is expected to get a job and have it until they die, why should musicians be excepted? Why should fat, old, irrelevant musicians continue to make money off of work that they did decades ago without offering something new to go with it?

At my day job, I come across more and more small record labels distributing music, much of it digital, but often as CDs and as the format celebre for audiophiles, vinyl. Vinyl sales, after dropping so drastically that it seemed there would never be a need for them again, have risen in the past ten years. The reason? Music pirates, again, this time, in the form of DJs. Grab some records, throw them on a mix, and upload it to the internet and next think you know, the ten, hundred, thousand people who had never heard of a record before now want nothing more than to own it. Of course, DJs were hunted and burned at the proverbial stake for not licensing tracks just a few years ago. The very people who were marketing music more successfully than the record companies, and who were doing so with absolutely zero kick back from labels. Yet they were persecuted for their de facto marketing, the accidental advertisement that sharing something you love with others who will also love it is.

It is not time for the record industry to wake up. They know exactly what is going on and cling to the old ways and terrorize the revolutionaries because they can only lay off so many more music lovers who work for peanuts, anyway, in their PR and marketing departments before they have to start cutting into their fat cat salaries. The record industry doesn’t need to wake up because they haven’t been asleep– how can they, when their worst nightmare is constantly coming true?

It is time for the music lovers, for all music lovers, to wake up. To demand a new business model, to demand a more direct link to divinity. To cut out the ticket scalpers and the Ticketmaster who supports them; to cut out the absurd cost of a CD or .99 a song when we spend every spare dollar we have on music, anyway; to cut out the cancerous, old man bands like Metallica who refuse to work for their money; to cut out the gatekeepers, the jailers, the poisonous, evil fucks who take a young girl like Britney Spears, take away her humanity, and turn her into a product, instead of an exciting, sparkling performer. There are so many examples of how the music industry indentures its wide-eyed servants, how it hooks them on money and flashbulbs and takes away the genuine, person to person article.

Last week, it seemed, the music industry was never going to be the same again. Madonna ditched a record label to sign with a tour promoter, sending the statement that at least she knows that musicians should go out and work for a living, instead of holing up in mansions and paying for their expensive vices with royalties forever. Radiohead released their album for whatever you wanted to pay for the digital version. While they have been roundly lauded for this move, I have to give even more props to Guy Hands, the truly (I hope and pray) forward thinking, brilliant, and enlightened chairman of EMI who praised Radiohead’s move (and who was smart enough to get this memo leaked to the press). “The recorded music industry,” he writes, “…has for too long been dependent on how many CDs can be sold. The industry, rather than embracing digitalization and the opportunities it brings for promotion of product and distribution through multiple channels, has stuck its head in the sand. Radiohead’s actions are a wake-up call which we should all welcome and respond to with creativity and energy.” Hands has taken over the only one of the big four music conglomerates (Warner, Universal, and Sony-BMG being the others) that solely deals in music. They have the most to lose by the destruction of record-labels-as-we-know-it, but they also have the most to gain. I wish them all the luck in the world in using their influence and wherewithal to orchestrate a top down industry revolution (and make all those media megacorps who haven’t purchased them wish that they had).

This week, however, it looks like a return to business as usual. But only if we let it. Only if we let these fundamentalist psychos burn the martyrs for no reason. It is time to demand a change to this industry or to reject it all together.

Here’s to the revolution. May it be streamed, uploaded, downloaded, blogged and podcast.