Hello, Hello Music

With the release of Smear Campaign a few months back, I decided to try out the services at Hello Music to see what they have to offer. With Smear Campaign having a much less accessible sound and style, it is always hard to determine how it will be viewed by others, especially those within the music industry. The album's purpose, first and foremost, was to entertain those interested in the dark ambient style, not to be a hit machine or a radio wet dream.

Just recently I received back a full report from Hello Music regarding Smear Campaign, which contained ratings, strengths, weaknesses and potential opportunity types. Much to my surprise, Smear Campaign's overall rating was not just above the average for similar releases, but for all releases reviewed. This in itself speaks highly to the ability of Hello Music's staff to rate fairly across genres, which is something I don't believe artists will find everywhere. Too many places will rate based on what is the most salable, turning music into straight commerce rather than a creative art. When a company proves to me they are able to consider the intended audience during the review process, I am much more willing to support them and utilize their services.

Given this screening was so recent, I can't yet speak about their ability to place my material or offer opportunities, but I will be sure to share my findings at a later time. From the newsletters they appear to be making a good number of placements, so I feel there is a decent chance.

Whoa, Kontakt!

I just wanted to write a quick blog here (from my phone, no less) about an issue I ran into while upgrading Kontakt 4. There appear to be a number of closed forum posts regarding this problem, but none seemed to have the solution.

The problem:
When trying to rebuild the database you receive an error saying "database is read-only and cannot be changed".

The solution:
Locate the files called kontaktdb and kontaktdbLock in your user's application data directory. You may need to use the search function if you aren't familiar with this directory. Delete both of these files (if kontaktdbLock did not exist, no worries). Restart Kontakt and your database will be recreated.

This was a PC install issue, so if you have this on a mac, you may need to keep searching.

Hopefully my digging will be useful to someone else.

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