KARLA TALLAS - SHARED TREASURES HARD ROCKER | Page 10

KING DIAMOND, Prague 2007
was more than clear. I hadn’t set up high prices
for adverts either. I really appreciate anyone
who is willing to pay, and I always create some
bonus for each business partner. Even this
fact worked against me more often than not.
For many of these partners, I was considered
nothing more than a naive fan and an easy
target of ridicule.
have a chance to promote their media at
prestigious festivals like Wacken Open Air.
The collaboration occurs at different levels of
course and the bigger ones are more exclusive
there, but you hardly can feel the disrespect or
the boycotting like I sadly had known from my
home country.
I guess it’s more than clear that the media are
mainly dependent on adverts and sponsors.
Keeping the magazine alive from sales that
didn’t reach any dizzying numbers is unrealistic.
After being involved for around 2 years on the
market, the situation became unmanageable
for me. There was no money left to pay the
awfully big liabilities. Unfair competition was at
its peak and the promoter I already wrote about
decided to terminate our agreement. I had no
chance to go on and get another sponsor at all.
So I tried one last step and started the digital
version of the magazine. By now it’s 2010 and
digital media are just starting to burst onto the
worldwide scene, so people mostly don’t react
to it, especially not in our country. There is no
The music, my team, the readers and the
promoters who all preferred working with
me rather than working with my competition
thanks to my human approach, they kept me
from falling. I also didn’t give up thanks to the
support from the foreign labels and promoters
who had given me some great feedback about
HARD ROCKER. They worked with us like we
were no different than the others. We had no
problem getting accreditations for prestigious
festivals like SWEDEN ROCK (one of the biggest
and most popular festivals in the world) and
events outside our country, even if we were
not a local magazine. For example, nobody
cared about the fact all the German magazines
10