As the record industry waits for Radiohead's "pay as you go" experiment to play out, New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund is still plugging away at our 99 cent downloads. Within the first week someone tried to hack into the charity's song platform to steal the music, so it's a brave new world of retail indeed.

On a sunnier note, MySpace and PayPal have launched a new Impact Charity Badge program and our grass-roots New Orleans Musicians Relief Fund is right up there with OxFam and One.org. With Badges! Donors' MySpace profiles will be shown in a donor tree. Within 5 minutes of posting we had a contribution from Think Swing at our MySpace NOMRF site.

Contributions start low, because it's hard enough to get .99 for a song. Just ask Radiohead. As a green charity we have never sent out glossy brochures, so this is as close as our grass-roots fund will get to a big rollout in support of the music.

After two years of doing their best to rebuild their lives, many musicians are still in Houston, Dallas or much further away. And we're losing them too soon. We just got back to Illinois and didn't have the chance to second line for New Birth Brass Band's Kerwin 'Fat' James, or see the 20 police cars that ensued.

NOMRF still rents no office space to help each donor dollar stretch further. Hundreds of grants have gone out thanks to supporters like Dr. John and REM, as well as caring individuals from around the world. The target goal, since PayPal asked for one, is $829,000 for ReDefine 8/29. Eight million seemed a little high to shoot for, but we're nothing if not optimists. The badge above is a live link to our MySpace page.

NOMRF will be back in town for NOLA.com's wonderful NOLA-Fest at Fat Harry's on Oct. 26th, so we hope to see you there as the streetcars roll by again.