Representatives of the social network VKontakte announced that you will have to pay for music.
To develop a model for monetization of audio recordings, the company invited the National Music Publishing House (NMI). Eizvestia reports that a special agreement was concluded for this purpose. The publishing house has catalogs containing more than 50 thousand musical works by musicians from Russia, as well as 400 thousand songs by foreign artists. VKontakte legalizes these audio files. Fortunately for the social network, but unfortunately for users, legalization will affect many songs that are not included in the NMI catalogs.
It looks like VKontakte is tired of paying compensation to labels for violating copyright and related rights. We're happy for the company and that it's starting to pay more attention to performers' rights, but not all users of the social network will be able to understand why they need to pay for something that was previously free. In other words, we believe that VKontakte may lose many users after free access to audio recordings is closed.
VKontakte is tightening the screws more and more tightly, forcing users to pay for listening to music. This does not suit many people (for example, those who listen to non-commercial releases or tracks of their own composition), and for them we have prepared instructions for free listening and downloading music from VK.
Honest way
Without signing up for a paid subscription, you can listen to music in a browser, not only desktop, but also mobile, including in the background. We do not rule out that this feature will soon be closed, and the same limitation will appear in the browser - .Bots and publics in Telegram
Many Telegram publics aggregate music from VK and allow you to search, listen and download it. Read more about the musical capabilities of Pavel Durov's messenger on our website at.Moosic
Moosic is an application released by the Mail.ru Group holding, which owns the social network VKontakte (we even have it). It has been removed from the official markets, but its Android version can be found on 4PDA, and it is still functional. The old version supports caching music for listening without an Internet connection.Time shift
When the VK application informs you that the free listening time has ended, try going to the time settings and set it to yesterday. It should work. When you finish listening, don't forget to put the real date back.Application mods
Some unofficial VK clients (for example, VK MP3 Mod and VK Coffee) still allow you to listen and download music, but VKontakte developers are fighting them and constantly introducing restrictions on the transfer of audio tracks to third-party resources.A subscription to unlimited listening to the VKontakte music “catalog” costs 149 rubles per month. The social network states that it does not make money from music, and gives all the money collected to the copyright holders. Any musician can get his share, but for this he needs to be signed by a label that has an agreement with the UMA company, which licenses music for VKontakte and other Mail.ru Group projects.
According to the publication Izvestia, the Mail.ru Group holding plans to introduce a paid subscription for audio recordings on the Vkontakte social network by the end of this year.
The reason for this step was the company’s efforts to legalize music content on the social network and the signing of a number of agreements with the largest foreign and domestic labels.
The music content itself can still be consumed for free, however, based on the words of the CEO of Warner Music Group in Russia, Alexander Blinov, Vkontakte will introduce a number of paid functions.
- You can listen to the audio recording for free, but a number of new paid functions will appear - for example, adding an audio recording to yourself. If you love performers, you should support them. And musicians must earn money in order to delight you with new songs. On VKontakte this can be done for the price of a cup of coffee.
Apparently, monetization will affect, first of all, the main functionality of Vkontakte as a music service: many people create their own playlists and collect a collection of their favorite tracks in the “Audio Recordings” section on their page. If the words of the CEO of Warner Music do not diverge from reality, then now maintaining your own “record library” will turn out to be paid.
The cost of a “cup of coffee” is also a very vague metric. There is a high probability that Mail.ru, together with copyright holders, will follow the path of Apple Music, where a subscription is issued, for example, for a month and costs 169 rubles. The company is also being pushed to take such a step by the success of the services of its main competitor in RuNet - the audience of Yandex.Music and Yandex.Radio (subscription cost 149 rubles) numbers about 20 million people.
Now the innovations are being tested on individual applications. For now, the changes will not affect mobile platforms, and after the introduction of subscriptions, audio recordings will return to iOS applications, from which they were removed back in 2014 due to Apple’s position on combating copyright infringement.
Copyright holders and representatives of Mail.ru promise that you can still listen to music on VK for free, but, apparently, only through searching for specific compositions. To access playlists of a specific artist or for the ability to create your own list of preferred compositions, already in 2017 you will have to pay.
The social network VKontakte will have new paid functions for listening to audio recordings, and the music section itself will be completely rethought. This was stated by representatives of the largest music majors - General Director of Universal Music Group in Russia Dmitry Konnov, General Director of Warner Music Group in Russia Alexander Blinov and General Director of Sony Music Entertainment in Russia Arina Dmitrieva during a round table at the VKontakte festival.
You can listen to the audio recording for free, but a number of new paid functions will appear - for example, adding an audio recording to yourself. If you love performers, you should support them. And musicians must earn money in order to delight you with new songs. On VKontakte this can be done for the price of a cup of coffee,” said Alexander Blinov.
- “VKontakte” is the only place on the Internet where music is closely connected with social interaction, people share playlists, send songs to each other. But now you can attach only 10 audio recordings, and this is only half an hour of listening, you need to increase it and make large, full-fledged playlists. But artists should have a description, all their singles, album breakdowns,” commented Arina Dmitrieva.
It is not known exactly when new opportunities will appear, but music rights holders promise until the end of this year.
We will test various monetization opportunities in collaboration with our major partners,” the VKontakte press service said.
The VKontakte press service also explained that testing will be carried out on a separate application (where there will be only music); there will be no changes in mobile applications yet.
As for the cost of subscriptions, all three representatives of the majors said that it would be equal to “the price of a cup of coffee.” The subscription itself will apparently be implemented in a similar way to Apple Music and can be issued for a month, providing access to advanced features.
Currently in Russia, a subscription to Apple Music is 169 rubles per month. In April of this year, it was reported that more than 13 million people bought a subscription to the service, and in January the number of Russian users amounted to 300 thousand people. For one of the most popular Russian streaming services, Yandex.Music, a monthly subscription costs 149 rubles. At the end of last year, streaming services themselves overtook regular music sales for the first time. As reported in a study by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA), revenue from all streaming services in the world in 2015 grew by 29% and amounted to $2.4 billion.
The head of the Yandex.Music business development group, Andrey Stebunov, said that over the past year the audience of Yandex music services has grown one and a half times; now the monthly audience of the Yandex.Music and Yandex.Radio services is more than 20 million users. In his opinion, users value good sound quality and convenience, so they are gradually abandoning pirated sites and services, choosing legal music applications.
People increasingly prefer to listen to music through services without downloading it to their devices. Many people like technology - recommendation technologies have learned to take into account the tastes of each listener and select music based on personal preferences. It looks like magic, but it works: the listener puts his likes and dislikes, and the technology takes into account his tastes and helps him listen to his favorite music and discover new ones,” commented Andrey Stebunov.
Music will also return to the social network’s iOS apps, when is also not specified. In February 2014, Apple removed the VK App from its store. The corporation is actively fighting piracy, so in order to return to the store, the social network had to remove the section with audio recordings from the iPhone and iPad applications.
On July 15 of this year, Mail.Ru Group, United Music Agency (the holding’s partner for interaction with copyright holders) signed an agreement with the third major copyright holder - Universal Music Group (previously signed with two others Warner Music Group and Sony Music Entertainment), and the social network VKontakte “signed a settlement agreement with Universal Music Group to resolve unresolved lawsuits (such agreements have also already been concluded with two others).
The press service of Mail.Ru Group reported that the concluded agreements provide access to licensed content from the world's leading record companies for users of all social networks included in the holding. That is, fees for audio recordings can be introduced not only on VKontakte, but also on the social networks Odnoklassniki and Moi Mir. Details of how much the subscription will cost and which features will be paid for have not yet been disclosed.
Director of Public Relations at the Federal State Unitary Enterprise Melodiya Firma Karina Abrahamyan said that people stopped buying albums and began buying subscriptions to music services because they are much cheaper. She believes that promoting music playlists, as implemented by the popular Western services Spotify and Apple Music, is the most obvious step for the development of the music direction on the social network.
Last quarter, for the first time, we earned more from streaming than from downloading albums. An album costs on average 99 rubles, and a subscription costs about 169 rubles, that is, for the cost of less than two albums you can get access to all the music. Apple Music is actively developing, users are already ready for the subscription model, comments Karina Abrahamyan. - Playlists that have millions of listens are popular with users (because there is a lot of different music) and bring good income to copyright holders. Starting from October, we will become the first Russian copyright holder - curator of playlists on Apple Music. Naturally, we will promote our audio recordings, but also add audio from other copyright holders so that the playlists become popular with users. Probably, VKontakte will do the same story, with editors and curators.
For the first time in ten years, the social network “VKontakte” carried out a large-scale update of the “Music” section. In addition to the changes affecting the appearance and functionality of the section, the mobile version of the social network now has a paid subscription for saving audio recordings offline and listening to tracks without advertising.
Listen for free, save for money
The function of saving music in a cache for later listening offline has migrated to the Boom mobile application, which offers a fixed tariff for 149 rubles. per month. With it, an Android or iOS user gets unlimited access to tracks and also gets rid of audio advertising.
Boom also has a free plan - it allows you to save up to an hour of music, but only works for the first 90 days. In addition, it also contains audio advertising.
“You can still listen to music on VKontakte for free,” emphasized VKontakte press secretary Evgeniy. He told Gazeta.Ru that Boom is an application of the social network’s partner, United Media Agency (UMA).
In 2016, VKontakte and United Music Agency signed partnership agreements with leading international music rights holders Universal Music Group, Warner Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment, Merlin Network and others. It is reported that the integration of Boom into the system for listening to audio recordings on the social network occurred at the request of copyright holders, who stated that listening to music offline cannot be free.
Krasnikov clarified that music caching, previously available to Android users, disappears, but the social network will save the list of tracks themselves in such playlists so that users do not lose it. They can be listened to when connected to the Internet.
The Boom application was created by United Media Agency together with, so that a paid subscription immediately applies to three social networks that are part of the holding: VKontakte, Odnoklassniki and My World.
The press service of Odnoklassniki confirmed to Gazeta.Ru that from today the social network allows you to listen to music without the Internet through a subscription in the Boom application. “Free listening to music online remains completely OK: both in the web version and in our mobile applications - in this case, copyright holders will receive royalties from advertising,” the press service of the social network said.
Odnoklassniki also announced their plans to update the Music section this year.
At the moment, Boom is only relevant for users of mobile applications, and a paid subscription is not required to listen to music via the web version on a computer. As for third-party applications offering to save music on VKontakte for free, the necessary measures were already taken by the social network in December 2016 - then VKontakte disabled the ability to search for audio recordings through the application program interface (API).
Musical consultations
In addition to introducing paid functions, VKontakte tried to make the music section more practical and functional.
VKontakte united people with diverse musical preferences, gave them the opportunity to communicate, create thematic communities, search for rare tracks and distribute their favorite music without restrictions. Music is an important part of the life of VKontakte users. Today we are launching a completely updated service and beginning a new stage of its development,” said the managing director of VKontakte.
Updated “Music” section on VKontakte // Press service of the social network
The design of the My Music tab is similar to the previous version of the section and includes the same elements: a track to listen to at the top of the page, a list of audio recordings and a search by friends on the right side.
The center now has quick access to playlists, which can now be shared on the wall or in private messages.
The section now has a “Recommendations” tab, which combines several services at once: a “smart” system of personal recommendations from VKontakte, which takes into account the user’s musical tastes, friends’ music, a list of new tracks and albums, as well as community playlists.
In addition, the user can now view friends' updates in news feed mode - the name of the audio recording and the time at which it was added.
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