Today we’ve announced our newly hatched personal ‘jukebox’ media player Yandex.Radio. This service will be appreciated by anyone wishing to always hear ambient music matching their personal preferences, or serving as a backdrop to anything they do or how they feel at any time of their day or night. The user interface of Yandex.Radio is simple and intuitive – it just lets you play the music that you will enjoy.
Yandex.Radio shares a catalogue of more than 20 million tracks with Yandex.Music, Yandex’s recommendation-based music streaming service, which was first launched in 2010 and re-launched after a major overhaul in 2014. While Yandex.Music helps listeners discover new music based on their interests and preferences, Yandex.Radio offers them the music that matches their current mood or activity.
Out of 10 million people currently tuning in to Yandex.Music every month, one million do this on their mobile phones. This million of people just like to have some background music while they are working out in a gym, driving to work, or chatting at a party. Alternatively, people choose their background music to match how they feel at the moment – cheerful or vigorous, moody or relaxed. Yandex.Radio is a service for those who like to choose their music based on their current activity or state of mind. The new service taps into the catalogue of Yandex.Music to offer these users more than a hundred stations to choose from – not only depending on their mood or current activity, but also on a genre or time period of music.
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Yandex.Radio is now available on desktop, as well as on iOS- and Android-based devices. The personal recommendation technology in use on the Yandex.Music service has also been implemented in Yandex.Radio to play music based not only on the listener’s settings, but also their personal preferences, streaming history, and previous likes or dislikes.
The new personal jukebox player is currently available free of charge only to users in Russia. The revenue from the service will come from audio advertising, which is a novel format for our business. Just like traditional radio broadcasting, Yandex.Radio will feature audio ads, which in the future will be complemented with a graphic image or text both in the app and on the desktop service. Advertisers on Yandex.Radio will be able to enjoy all the advertising and audience targeting possibilities available to them on Yandex.Direct, as well as banner advertising.