Downloadable Soundtrack for a Book: How to Break Bad News

Eric Steuer (who you may know as creative director of Creative Commons), writes in with news about a personal side project he's been working on that launched this morning.

My friend Tim Molloy and I put together a soundtrack for Tim's new novel, "How to Break Bad News" (Virgin Books), which is about a reporter who goes undercover at a fast food restaurant chain to expose labor abuses - but then finds he prefers working there to being a reporter.

The soundtrack is being distributed for free by RCRD LBL and features 14 tracks by acts like Dirty on Purpose, Sam Champion, Michna, and CoCo B's.

It's all here: "How to Break Bad News" soundtrack.

There's a soundtrack release party at Hugs in Williamsburg, Brooklyn on Thursday. Tim will be reading from and singing copies of the book, while the guys from RCRD LBL will DJ sets that include songs from the soundtrack.

Embedded soundtrack below, but you'll want to visit the rcrdlbl post for all the project details.

• [Anonymous]

  “Downloadable Soundrack for a Book: How to Break Bad News”

  X,

  I think you mean “Downloadable SoundTrack”…

  love always,
  – MrJM

  • [Antinous / Moderator]

    Fixed.

• [hassan-i-sabbah]

  Ratatatatat,Hey!Billy and the kids are dead!

• [Telecustard]

  Tim will be reading from and singing copies of the book, while the guys from RCRD LBL will DJ sets that include songs from the soundtrack.

  Good show. If it’s a book with a soundtrack, then it stands to reason that someone should sing it.

• [angry young man]

  This book’s plot is the same as that of a NewsRadio episode, “Lucky Burger.”

  http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0660204/

  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L43U_6na6rU

• [manicbassman]

  he’ll be singing his book???

  anyway, it would help their bandwidth if they’d made a torrent available…

• [gramiq]

  Manitoban author Daria Salamon did this for her debut novel last year, “The Prairie Bridesmaid.”

  http://www.theprairiebridesmaid.com/soundtrack.php

  Some of the artists contributed unreleased songs to the project.

  I think it’s an innovative way to drive sales of both books and music, both of which are having some difficulty transitioning to the internet.

  (full disclosure: I help put on a literary festival in my hometown every year and Daria gave a reading last year. She said that convincing her publisher was difficult, since it’s more expensive to print books that have unique download codes on each one, but that it ended up being very worthwhile.)

  Oh, also I’ve seen magazines do this sometimes — in particular Esquire. I don’t think it’s downloadable, but they give a list of songs and tell you what stories they go with.

• [Chris Evo]

  Listening to the soundtrack now in the embedded widget, it’s all great stuff and I may have to pick up the book soon.

  Am I missing a link somewhere? All I’ve found are individual links to download the songs one at a time from separate pages, and for such a slick idea that seems like terrible implementation. If anyone could point me on my way that’d be great.

• [obi1kenobi1]

  I was just about to mention that NewsRadio episode, but it appears someone else beat me to it…

• [Anonymous]

  hey chris – the full album is available as a zip file at http://rcrdlbl.com/download/How_to_Break_Bad_News or you hit the individual song links to grab a track by itself.

• [hassan-i-sabbah]

  Bad news is always better sung.iT KINDA TAKES THE EDGE OFF.

• [hassan-i-sabbah]

  Better sung than shouted.’pologies

• [Sir Greg]

  I don’t really get it…
  How does this actually work?
  I mean, everyone reads at a different speed, so you can never know where in the book you are at a particular moment in time…
  Are you supposed to switch the tracks yourself?

• [trr]

  So the “Bad News” is that being a reporter is a crummy job?