Russia, known for video and audio piracy on its social networking services and other websites, may expand legitimate digital music offerings through a joint effort of the country’s most popular search engine–Yandex NV–and Facebook.
The Yandex.Music application, which is available in Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Kazakhstan, is now integrated with Facebook, which means that now Facebook users can tell their friends about their favorite songs simply by playing them on Yandex.Music.
Every track the user listens to on Yandex.Music instantly appears in their friends’ news feeds on Facebook. Facebook users can play tracks that their friends listened to on Yandex.Music right from the Facebook news feed, with no additional registration or authorization.
In September alone, according to comScore, 3.6 million people listened to Yandex.Music at least once. The service cooperates with over 50 intellectual property rights holders, including Universal Music Russia, WEA International Inc., EMI Records Limited and Sony Music Entertainment, which for a fee provide free content to the service. Today Yandex.Music has 2.6 million songs by Russian and international artists available in high-quality audio for free licensed streaming according to the company data.
“People have always shared music online. First, it was just a song title below a blog entry. Then, everyone started sharing links to other websites with some music content – single tracks or, like it is on Yandex.Music, entire playlists. Now, someone can just stream a track online and their friends will instantly be able to click ‘play’ to listen to this composition,” says Sergei Fayfer, project manager at Yandex.Music.
Olga Razumovskaya