In the past, Russia has been one of the countries where music piracy seemed hardest to tackle, but a combination of things – including social network vKontakte coming in from the licensing cold and a governmental crackdown on filesharing sites – has made the picture rosier.
Another of those positive steps has been the growth of streaming service Yandex Music, owned by one of Russia’s largest internet companies.
In June 2019 we reported on Yandex Music nearing the milestone of two million paying subscribers, having doubled that total over the past year. The company’s latest news announcement updates that figure: in late January 2020, Yandex Music had 3.3 million premium subscribers, thus having grown more than threefold over the last year and a half.
That’s encouraging, especially for Yandex Music’s home market – it’s also available in some other post-Soviet states, while it launched in Israel in 2018 too – where streaming subscriptions have been growing.
According to the IFPI, subscriptions generated $57.3m of revenues in Russia in 2018 – growth of 165.5% year-on-year. Over that period, subscriptions grew from being 36.8% of total music sales in Russia to 58.9%, driving 25% growth for the overall market.
But we mentioned a ‘latest news announcement’. That’s about Yandex Music’s voice assistant, Alice – its equivalent of Amazon’s Alexa or Apple’s Siri. Alice is being put to work offering context for Yandex Music’s daily, personalised playlist (‘Playlist of the Day’) and its radio-like (but again, personalised to each listener) endless ‘Stations’ stream.
She “comments [on] every track, entertains, and lets listeners learn more about music, artists and culture” according to the press release. For example, short facts about artists and tracks, which Yandex Music describes as ‘shots’.
This sort of thing exists in different forms on global streaming services. Spotify’s partnership with Genius for ‘behind the lyrics’ facts did it with text for individual tracks, and it’s been testing its ‘Storyline’ feature for artists to provide similar content. Meanwhile, Apple Music listeners can ask Siri to “tell me more about this artist” and hear some information.
Yandex Music’s application of Alice to personalised playlists is an interesting complement to those: alongside the tech being worked on by startups like Super Hi-Fi, another glimpse at how AI might help music streaming to sound… well, to sound a bit more like traditional radio.
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