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Music News

  • NASA is planning to transmit the Beatles song “Across the Universe” towards the North Star, Polaris, on Monday, to mark the 50th anniversary of NASA and the 45th anniversary of their Deep Space Network. Polaris is 431 light years away, so they should be receiving it about the same time Beatles tracks show up on iTunes. I wonder if they’re broadcasting it with DRM?

  • Members of TV on the Radio and The Roots are set to cover a civil rights-era freedom song for an upcoming documentary. The film, Soundtrack for a Revolution, is being produced by Danny Glover. No word on a release date.

  • U2 may be considering a record-setting residency at London’s O2 Arena later this year. Prince played a run of 21 shows at the venue last summer, but the Irish combo are reportedly planning an even longer set of dates.

  • The deluxe edition reissue of Beck‘s classic 1996 album Odelay was released with screwed-up lyrics in the booklet. The LA-based musician issued an apology for the mishap, which reportedly was due to a designer grabbing un-proofed lyrics from a lyrics website. But as Rolling Stone points out, “she’s alone in a new dilusion” (sic) may actually be an improvement.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

The short of it: Last year, we had to cut $1 million from our budget so we could have any chance of breaking even by the time our fiscal year ended in June. And despite a huge rally from so many of you leading up to the deadline, we still came up a bit short on the whole. We canā€™t let that happen again. We have no wiggle room to begin with, and now we have a hole to dig out of.

Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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