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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State of the Music

Things have been moving quite fast recently, though they may not seem to be. My move to Soundcloud is still in process, bringing to light a lot of music people may have missed previously on my site, due to the lack of promotional abilities for individual works. I'm sure many readers have seen these tracks popping up on Facebook and Twitter. Along with placing these older tracks online, I've been finding new homes for them in publishing libraries and pitching them for placement opportunities. Still awaiting responses on most items, but the prospects are looking good.

There has been recent activity regarding Smear Campaign as it was recently reviewed by Gird_09 at Kaliglimmer. Overall the review was quite positive, which I am very thankful for. There should be another review coming soon as well. I can only hope for more kind words.

I am still awaiting the launch of Smear Campaign through Amazon's on demand print service, which will hopefully lead to the tracks being picked up by Pandora. I've run across a good number of tracks they would mingle well amongst, hopefully the staff at Pandora agrees.

As for new projects, there are some films coming my way, including a film by Steve Fletcherson called Crazed. There is also a potential acoustic collaboration project being felt out, which will be detailed when the time comes. If things pan out, live performances will be included.

For now, Relentless is still the highest priority item and is moving along. More updates here soon.