September 18, 2007

Tuesday: Doozy of a Music News Day

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God Save the Queen

  • Reunion mania continues: John Lydon tells NME that the Sex Pistols will come together for a one-off concert at Brixton Academy November 8th, their first show since… oh, just since 2002. Yawn. NME tries to drum up excitement by spearheading a campaign to send “God Save the Queen” to #1 on the charts for its 30th anniversary, a position it was supposedly denied in 1977 by, you know, chart freemasons or whatever, desperate to preserve the Queen’s dignity in her jubilee year.

  • With Kanye West on track to outsell 50 Cent by at least 100,000 records this week, Fiddy cancelled his U.K. promo appearances after selling less than Mr. West there as well; he had threatened to retire from solo albums if West won the sales race.

  • The venerable management company The Firm has dropped Britney Spears as a client, after only one month. The Firm was to spearhead Brit’s comeback, but released a statement saying “current circumstances have prevented us from properly doing our job.” Ouch.

  • Nine Inch Nails frontman Trent Reznor, frustrated by high CD prices and distribution problems in Australia and China, respectively, is telling concert-goers to steal his music. A YouTube clip shows him telling a Sydney audience, “Steal it, steal away, give it to your friends.” He also told a Beijing audience that because Western music is difficult to find via legal channels in China, that “downloading from the Internet is a more acceptable options than buying pirated CDs.”

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    WE CAME UP SHORT.

    We just wrapped up a shorter-than-normal, urgent-as-ever fundraising drive and we came up about $45,000 short of our $300,000 goal.

    That means we're going to have upwards of $350,000, maybe more, to raise in online donations between now and June 30, when our fiscal year ends and we have to get to break-even. And even though there's zero cushion to miss the mark, we won't be all that in your face about our fundraising again until June.

    So we urgently need this specific ask, what you're reading right now, to start bringing in more donations than it ever has. The reality, for these next few months and next few years, is that we have to start finding ways to grow our online supporter base in a big way—and we're optimistic we can keep making real headway by being real with you about this.

    Because the bottom line: Corporations and powerful people with deep pockets will never sustain the type of journalism Mother Jones exists to do. The only investors who won’t let independent, investigative journalism down are the people who actually care about its future—you.

    And we hope you might consider pitching in before moving on to whatever it is you're about to do next. We really need to see if we'll be able to raise more with this real estate on a daily basis than we have been, so we're hoping to see a promising start.

    payment methods

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