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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    THE FACTS SPEAK FOR THEMSELVES.

    At least we hope they will, because that’s our approach to raising the $350,000 in online donations we need right now—during our high-stakes December fundraising push.

    It’s the most important month of the year for our fundraising, with upward of 15 percent of our annual online total coming in during the final week—and there’s a lot to say about why Mother Jones’ journalism, and thus hitting that big number, matters tremendously right now.

    But you told us fundraising is annoying—with the gimmicks, overwrought tone, manipulative language, and sheer volume of urgent URGENT URGENT!!! content we’re all bombarded with. It sure can be.

    So we’re going to try making this as un-annoying as possible. In “Let the Facts Speak for Themselves” we give it our best shot, answering three questions that most any fundraising should try to speak to: Why us, why now, why does it matter?

    The upshot? Mother Jones does journalism you don’t find elsewhere: in-depth, time-intensive, ahead-of-the-curve reporting on underreported beats. We operate on razor-thin margins in an unfathomably hard news business, and can’t afford to come up short on these online goals. And given everything, reporting like ours is vital right now.

    If you can afford to part with a few bucks, please support the reporting you get from Mother Jones with a much-needed year-end donation. And please do it now, while you’re thinking about it—with fewer people paying attention to the news like you are, we need everyone with us to get there.

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