VKontakte audio recordings will become paid. VKontakte music will become paid before the end of the year Are audio recordings on VK paid?
Representatives of the social network VKontakte announced that they would have to pay for music.
To develop a monetization model for audio recordings, the company invited the National Music Publishing House (NMI). Eizvestia reports that a special agreement was concluded for this. 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 catch many songs that are not included in the NMI catalogs.
It seems that VKontakte is tired of paying compensation to labels for violation of copyright and related rights. We are happy for the company and that it has begun to pay more attention to the rights of performers, however, not all users of the social network will be able to understand why they need to pay for something that used to be free. In other words, we believe that VKontakte may lose many users after the closure of free access to audio recordings.
VKontakte tightens the screws more and more, 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 listening to and downloading music from VK for free.
honest way
Without a paid subscription, you can listen to music in the browser, not only desktop, but also mobile, including in the background. We do not exclude that soon this possibility will be covered, and the same restriction 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 company, which owns the VKontakte social network (we even have it). It has been removed from official markets, but its Android version can be found on w3bsit3-dns.com and it's still functional. The old version supports caching of music for listening without an Internet connection.Time Shift
When the VK application announces the end of the free listening time, try going to the time settings and set yesterday. Should work. At the end of listening, do not forget to return 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 the VKontakte developers are fighting them and constantly introducing restrictions on the delivery 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 claims that it does not make money on 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 UMA, which licenses music for VKontakte and other Mail.ru Group projects.
According to 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 major foreign and domestic labels.
The music content itself can still be consumed for free, however, based on the words of Alexander Blinov, CEO of Warner Music Group in Russia, Vkontakte will introduce a number of paid features.
- You can listen to the audio recording for free, but there will be a number of new paid features - for example, add an audio recording to yourself. If you love performers, you should support them. And musicians have to earn money to please 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 keeping your own "record library" will be paid.
The cost per “cup of coffee” is also a very vague metric. It is highly likely that Mail.ru, together with the 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 pushed to such a step by the success of the services of the main competitor in Runet - the audience of Yandex.Music and Yandex.Radio (subscription price is 149 rubles) has about 20 million people.
Now innovations are being tested on individual applications. While the changes will not affect mobile platforms, and after the introduction of a subscription, audio recordings will return to iOS applications, from which they were removed back in 2014 due to Apple's position on combating copyright infringement.
The copyright holders and representatives of Mail.ru promise that it will still be possible to listen to music on VK for free, but, apparently, only through the search for specific songs. To access the playlists of a specific artist or to create your own list of preferred songs already in 2017, you will have to pay.
The social network "VKontakte" for the first time in ten years has carried out a large-scale update of the "Music" section. In addition to the fact that the changes affected the appearance and functionality of the section, a paid subscription appeared in the mobile version of the social network to save audio recordings offline and listen to tracks without ads.
Listen for free, save for money
The function of saving music to the cache for later listening offline migrated to the Boom mobile application, which offers a fixed rate for 149 rubles. per month. Together with it, the Android or iOS user gets unlimited access to tracks, and also gets rid of audio ads.
Boom also has a free plan - it allows you to save up to an hour of music, but it only works for the first 90 days. It also includes audio ads.
“You can still listen to music on VKontakte for free,” said Evgeny, a spokesman for VKontakte. He told Gazeta.Ru that Boom is an application of a social network partner, the United Media Agency (UMA).
In 2016, VKontakte and United Music Agency signed partnership agreements with the 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 of listening to audio recordings on the social network occurred at the request of copyright holders, who said that listening to music offline cannot be free.
Krasnikov clarified that music caching, previously available for Android users, is disappearing, 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 the United Media Agency together with, so that the paid subscription covers three social networks included in the holding at once: 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, the 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 relevant only for users of mobile applications, and a paid subscription is not required to listen to music through the web version on a computer. As for third-party applications that offer 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 program interface (API).
Musical consultations
In addition to introducing paid features, VKontakte tried to make the music section more practical and functional.
VKontakte brought together 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 renewed service and starting a new stage of its development,” said the Managing Director of VKontakte.
Updated section "Music" in "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: the track you are listening to at the top of the page, the list of audio recordings and the search for friends on the right side.
Quick access to playlists has appeared in the center, which can now be shared on the wall or in private messages.
The “Recommendations” tab appeared in the section, 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, now the user can see the updates of friends in the news feed mode - the name of the audio recording and the time at which it was added.
