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 please 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.

The VKontakte company decided to make money on music that users themselves upload. But it turned out... So-so. The article will help you decide whether it’s worth paying money for a subscription, or whether it’s better to switch to other services.

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Not long ago, the popular social network Vkontakte introduced a fee of 150 rubles for full use of its music. Which reflected poorly on her in general. I believe that this streaming service has no right to take money for this and now I will try to explain my point of view and make it clear why you should NOT buy a subscription to VK MUSIC.

People haven’t bought music in Russia for a very long time. Durov himself even spoke about this. This has become a kind of tradition. As soon as the first Internet appeared, everyone immediately began recording music on recorders, CDs, anywhere, just not to pay. Music in terrible quality, with low bitrate - all this was with us before Vkontakte. After the advent of VKontakte, music finally began to normalize. The quality is not the best, but at least some. The average bitrate on VKontakte is 258 kb/s. And so, when everyone started uploading music to VKontakte, and not to a disk, recorder or anywhere else, copyright holders began to complain. Discs are no longer needed, cassettes have lost popularity, and recording music on a dictaphone no longer makes sense. After the advent of smartphones, the meaning of disks completely disappeared. Why buy music on CD if it is available for free on VKontakte? And you don't even need to download! Copyright holders began to complain even more. Sales have fallen and the main profit for everyone is the sale of merch and performances. After that, streaming services appeared, which allowed both performers to make a profit and users to listen to music online. Streaming services offered excellent quality at an affordable price. But the quality on VKontakte still remains from the time of 2010.

But now they have begun to demand money for this quality. WE'RE LIKE EVERYONE else. But the analogues are clearly better. And this is the main mistake of VKontakte.

Music is uploaded by the user himself

Yes, this is exactly how VKontakte works. VKontakte is in the same position as it was in 2010. All music is uploaded by users. And the social network itself plays the role of cloud storage. All music is uploaded without the permission of any artists. It is downloaded by users. Yes, the social network has signed several agreements, but at the moment, no money is being paid to the performers, and there is still pirated music. How strange is it that we pay for pirated music? That's exactly what it is. At the same time, in analogues, for example, in Apple Music, most of the amount goes to the performer, and not to the company, as is now happening on Vkontakte. This is a serious problem. Because when you buy a subscription, you are not supporting the artist. This is the same as continuing to download pirated music, but paying for downloading it. In addition to all this, you pay for the fact that you loaded it there yourself.

Quality remained in 2010

Same price as analogues

Yes, indeed, 150 rubles is not that much. Every student can afford this price, but is it necessary?

If you look at analogues that have been on the market for quite a long time, you will notice that Apple Music and Google Music offer much more for exactly the same price. And at the same time, you will receive good quality music that is uploaded by the artist himself. You get covers for the tracks, a convenient application, good quality music, lyrics for almost every track and licensed music. Apple Music also has discounts for students; a subscription for students will cost you 75 rubles/month. Hah, do you need VKontakte music after this? Don't know. At the same time, by paying for a subscription to similar services, you support the artist. By paying for a subscription on VKontakte, you support piracy in its purest form.

1. Firstly, the price. VKontakte’s price is almost the same as that of all streaming services, but there are fewer features and worse quality.

Google Music- 159 rubles per month.

Apple Music- 169 rubles per month. If you are a student, a subscription will cost you 75 rubles per month.

Yandex.Music- 169 rubles per month.

Spotify- 570 rubles per month. You can cheat and buy a subscription through the countries of Malaysia and the price will be 160 rubles. (Account may be blocked)

As you can see, in terms of price, of course, VKontakte wins, the difference is not great, only 20 rubles. But considering the student subscription that comes with Apple Music, for a student, Apple Music is the best choice for a school student.

2. Music quality.

Google Music- 320 kb/s, in MP3 format.

Apple Music- 256 kb/s, AAC format. (256 kb/s AAC format = 320 kb/s MP3 format)

Yandex.Music- 320 kb/s, in MP3 format.

Spotify- 320 kb/s, in MP3 format.

In terms of music quality, all services are already ahead of VKontakte. For the same price, VKontakte offers a range of music from 92 kb/s to 320 kb/s. Is VKontakte worth the money? No.

4. Licensed music database.

Google Music- 30 million tracks.

Apple Music- 43 million tracks.

Yandex.Music- 17 million tracks.

Spotify- 30 million tracks.

Alas, there is no licensed music on VKontakte. At the moment, VKontakte is only signing contracts with different companies. But at the moment, all VKontakte music is pirated.

In addition, there are a ton of remixes in the VKontakte database, which pollutes the music database. As I wrote above, among the music you find useless remixes of “BY VASYAN” and music that has the wrong name. Wrong covers, or music without covers at all.

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 please you with new songs. On VKontakte this can be done for the price of a cup of coffee.

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.