A selection of public pages with music on a famous social network

What good music publics on VKontakte can you recommend?

I will be happy to answer your question. There are many VK public pages dedicated to music, I will try to highlight the more preferable ones. But, of course, based, first of all, on your subjective opinion (and you didn’t indicate your preferred genres). The order in which the public pages are located below has nothing to do with their rating; the order is arbitrary. I don’t pretend to be comprehensive; you definitely can’t cover everything here, and you don’t know everything.

vk.com - Wonderful public page “History of Music”. Here, every day they celebrate certain events that took place in the world of music on one day or another in a certain year, some significant dates (birthdays, release days of singles, albums, concerts, etc.), publish review posts on albums of different genres (primarily rock music (usually classic rock or genres close to it), high-quality pop music), share current news from the music world, publish interesting facts about performers, songs, compositions, albums, etc. You can often see various thematic collections, stories of the creation of a specific song or album (in fact, initially, apparently, the public was guided by this, as we can see from the title).

vk.com - Melodies and rhythms of your favorite albums. They publish, as is again clear from the name, music in albums, always telling about the history of their creation, biographical facts about the activities of specific performers; sometimes the descriptions are of a review nature (the achievements of the written album are noted, its strong and not so strong things, the characteristic features of the album as a whole and individual compositions, innovation, progression of the group, or, conversely, decline), or simply note the assessment of critics, what awards the product brought to the authors /performers. Mostly you can see classic rock music, sometimes folk (not modern, as a rule), jazz, sometimes pop music (but also, as in the public above, very selective), sometimes electronic music. They try to share new musical releases. Good public.

E-music public network (main page: vk.com): thematic music publics of various directions and genres in music - from classic rock, jazz, folk to Soviet music, marching music, drone, ambient, witch house, wonka and so on . Here is a menu with a catalog of pages: vk.com. There are also public pages dedicated to books, movies, and computer toys. I won’t post links to specific public pages, because there are so many of them. By the way, there is a division into public pages dedicated to the music of specific cities in Russia.

BBC Radio Publics. As you know, this radio has several stations, each of which is dedicated to something specific. This information resource is musically interesting, therefore music lovers, lovers of music and these radio stations in general decided to reflect the relevant material within the framework of VK. I’ll write about more interesting ones.

BBC Radio 1 (VK page - vk.com) - mainly on it you can hear modern electronic music (techno, trance, trip-hop, instrumental hip-hop, and so on). They publish new releases, long plays, and sets by various artists. participating radio stations, ratings, charts, archived broadcasts, rotations (all in English, of course) radio stations, genre selections, thematic selections (ala summer music, etc.).

BBC Radio 6 (vk.com - VK link) - there is an unusual mixture of music: on the one hand, a lot of classic rock, jazz, funk, reggae of the last century, on the other - quite a lot of modern folk, indie, electronic and pop music, but all quite selective. They also publish archived episodes of programs, current programs (all in the original language), talk about new music, memorable dates, etc. Music lovers will be able to pick up quite a lot of interesting material, especially if they listen to the programs. Musicians are often invited to talk and discuss materials.

vk.com - Music lovers of psycho-prog-art-ethno-blues-rock. One of my favorite publics. If you are interested in these genres, you will find a lot of interesting things here, although sometimes the administrators shy away from the main topic; you can, for example, see selections of classic pop music (Michael Jackson, George Michael, for example), trip-hop, quite classical music . But mostly prog, psychedelic, art, jazz, fusion. The music is published to a greater extent as an album (they also talk about the artist, the features of the album, its history, or they always indicate the instrumental component (the listed genres, as a rule, are always associated with multi-instrumentalism). Memorable musical dates and significant dates are highlighted. There are enough lively discussions in the public (in many groups/publics they have already died) regarding musical preferences and the like. Sometimes you can see questionnaires with album ratings. In general, fans of psych-prog-art-ethno-blues-rock will definitely appreciate this public.

vk.com - Collection Of Elite Music. Encyclopedia of music lovers. It sounds pathetic and pretentious, but the public is good, we’ll forgive him for that.) Again, albums of music from the 20th century are mostly published, sometimes with descriptions of interesting facts and features of the work, the album as a whole. The description of the VK public is as follows: “A page for those who love music of all genres and styles; music that has beautiful harmony; music that caresses the ear and makes us perceive the world around us in a completely different light... If you are a music lover, love rock and roll, blues, jazz and just good music, then this is the place for you! :-)". The predominant genres are clearly indicated.

vk.com - World of intellectual music. Newly published album music - classic rock, blues, jazz, prog, art and so on.

vk.com - One day in the history of music. A musical calendar with a story about the facts of the history of song writing, from the lives of musicians, etc.

For lovers of classical music:

vk.com - Classical music. Perhaps the most popular public page on this topic is VKontakte. Many selections (thematic and by composer/performer, sometimes they publish the creations of beginners and not only modern musicians). The society has a formalized search for works by composers' names.

vk.com - a public page with the same name - Classical music. Thematic selections and specific composers/performers.

vk.com - Academic music. Representative of the Academic public network (there is also an Academician of design, sculpture, dance, architecture, and so on). Mostly selections by composer, always in black and white (or, in any case, they avoid color altogether).

vk.com - High music. A very sincere public dedicated to the classics, in my opinion. Often the selections are accompanied by poetry, facts about the lives of composers and performers, stories about the conditions for writing a particular work, the musician’s influence on public life, and so on. Also wonderful visual accompaniment.

If you like jazz:

JAZZ public network

vk.com - JAZZ | Contemporary | Fusion | World. This, if you like, is not such classic Jazz. Modern; fusion, which came out of jazz (well, the name hints, “fusion”); jazz played in different parts of the world.

Experimental styles of jazz:

vk.com - JAZZ | Bop | Cool | Modal

vk.com - Avantgarde | Free | PostBop

Jazz of all times and peoples:

vk.com JAZZ JAZZ

vk.com JazzPeople

Classic American jazz: vk.com USA School of Jazz 50-60

Here is interesting Soviet music (not pop music): vk.com

Another favorite public page is vk.com/feedyourhead. Many selective musical selections of different genres (psychedelic, prog, trip-hop, jazz, soul, funk, etc.) that are not (for the most part) related to the mainstream movement will be approved by connoisseurs. The material is very interesting. Music both modern and last century.

Targeting, seeding, music promotion and fraud in VK

December 21, 2021 |

Hello! My name is Maxim, I am a musician.

In this short article I want to tell you what I know about targeting and seeding music content. I looked through everything I could on YouTube on this topic and couldn’t find answers to many questions.

In this article I want to share my practical experience and help you save your money. We all know that making money for musicians is not easy.

This video complements the article. I recommend watching the video and reading the article. 2 times.

What is the fundamental difference between this article and all the others: I won’t tell you what a target is, what buttons to press in your personal account, how to set up audiences - all this stuff should be known to you without me if you are promoting your creativity, so I won't take up any extra time from you.

So, let's go.

Crops in public

I play rock. I don’t think there is a fundamental difference in how you can promote your tracks, whether you play rock or write rap. The technology is simple and it works the same for everyone.

For crops, you essentially have 2 working options.

Working through the market in the VK advertising account
Direct communication with public administrators and work through them

Market

The difference between the market and direct work with publics is that on the market you see real amounts, how much it costs in different publics. You see the daily coverage and coverage of the post - it will be interesting even just to get acquainted with the situation on the market: what and how much it really costs.

The problem with the market is that your post will appear in the public of your choice marked “advertising”, and people do not like advertising and there is often a lot of negativity associated with it. The conclusion is quite simple - you need to test. Ultimately, you should not care about hiding and complaining. You do all this for the sake of those people who will like your work, even if there are few of them.

The second difference is that not all public pages are represented on the market. the most interesting ones sell advertising directly, usually at a high price.

In my opinion, advertising through the market is the last thing I would do when you have already received all possible impressions everywhere you can and want to expand your reach even more at the expense of a dubious audience.

Get ready to lose money on tests. Only through tests and your own skin will you understand what works and what doesn’t.

Also, if you are careful enough, you will be able to understand which publics you should post in, and which ones will simply lose your hard-earned money.

So, everything is clear with the market - we use it only if you need more audience and you are willing to pay bots for impressions so that some units of your audience can be found among them.

Publics directly

The second option is to work with publics directly. There are individual publics, there are networks of publics. Both here and there, you carefully study the feed and look at the number of lucas, reposts, coverage and the ratio of lucas to coverage. Large reach and few likes = bot farm.

If posts are closed for comments, immediately cross this public page off the list. Don't even think about posting anything there. This is a botpublic.

If you see 8-15 thousand views and 12 likes, this is a reason to doubt that the public has a live audience. I don’t know the full scale of the disaster, but I heard about account farms, about payment for action, which means that likes can be given both by accounts artificially created en masse and by people for a penny.

For example, you pay 1500 rubles for a post. and 700 likes are drawn under it in a couple of hours. You start looking at who puts them up, the profiles of these people, and it’s complete crap. 2 friends, only reposts on the wall, often not a single photo at all, except for the avatar. This only means one thing - you've been screwed. Just that, it’s cruel and you won’t get this money back. Even if out of these 1,500 rubles the admin gave 700 rubles for actions to people who give you likes or partially join your group, this is still a deception.

If a live person gave a like, but at the same time he received, for example, 1 ruble for it, this is a dead audience, ballast that you do not need.

So, two things: bots and pay-per-action . When analyzing public posts, keep this in mind.

There are worthy communities where you can advertise. You can distinguish them by the number of real comments under the posts. People are busy in the comments, there are whole sheets of correspondence. This is an indicator that the public is alive and well. This is also an indicator that the admin does not post any trash there and most likely posting will be expensive.

In all my time I have found only 2 such public pages and both are not suitable for me, because in one there is an indie audience, and in the other there are listeners of Timati and Temnikova. not that either.

Advantages of working with publics directly:

Your post is not marked as “advertising”. The result is native advertising, with a more positive impact.
You pay directly and there is an opportunity to sell for discounts for permanent work or package placement
All. there are no more advantages.

Here you can develop a theory about the fact that in such and such a public there is a target audience, super returns, real people. The admins and their sales people will tell you this nonsense. You should have one thing in your head: specific numbers related to your specific creativity. Likes, reposts, views (aka reach), conversion from views to likes, conversion from views to transitions, conversion of their transitions to introductions.

Everything else is emotions, and emotions and money should be separate.

What I encountered while conducting advertising campaigns on the public network several times.

I gathered an audience that responded to posts with my creativity and tried to upload it to the VK advertising account. and the contact cut almost all of it. Imagine my surprise, I thought that these were people who liked my work, but in fact the contact considered them bots and refused to upload them to the audience for retargeting. The fucked up accommodations, right?

This is how you pay money, see likes, even see transitions to your group and joins, then in your group’s statistics you see that people have hidden notifications. Well, guess what, you subscribed to the group and immediately hid the notifications. why did you sign up then? That's right, because you got paid. These are the kind of subscribers you can also gain, they will either quickly fall off on their own, or they will simply hang as a dead weight.

Well, none of the admins tell you about this? Let's move on.

Fraud

Let's talk about scammers.

As soon as you start promoting your release, advertisers themselves will start knocking on your doorstep. Apparently money is tight and they want to sell their audience to you, while simultaneously upselling some services. in short, you start to get excited. There is great danger here.

The problem with promoting your creativity is that it is very similar to gambling, where you let your guard down and sometimes make stupid mistakes out of emotion. A couple of days later you think, I’m such a loser, I have to get there like this...

This happened to me just recently. Here is a screenshot of a correspondence with one admin in quotes, who, after transferring money to him, erased the entire correspondence history and blocked me.

The amount is ridiculous, I feel sorry for this dude, since he doesn’t have the brains to do something normal for a living. In general, fraud is something you should be prepared to face. These people don’t give a damn that you are a musician and not a businessman, they are ready to screw more and more people for a penny.

Part of the reason for writing this article was my desire to warn you against such assholes.

The second type of fraudster is a real representative of the public. Here I also made a mistake by placing an advertisement in the public page without studying it enough. These people will fuck you up in the same way, only more beautifully.

They have public pages filled with bots. These bots give likes, monotonous comments, and posts have reach. Often posts have hidden comments. I already spoke about this before - these guys will be immediately banned. If you see that the number of likes/reposts and reach figures under each post are suspiciously similar, this is a scam.

In general, it’s very unpleasant to encounter such people, but what can you do, it’s Runet, baby.

What to pay attention to if they write to you, 2 points:

Is this person in the admins of the public in which he offers advertising, and the link to him must completely match, check the link and not just the name and avatar. If it’s not in the admins, you’ll be immediately banned and the “fraud” button will appear.
Targetologists will write to you with a portfolio containing dead groups or people with public pages with almost zero activity. in short, this is also a hat and not worth your attention

So, I hope that everything is more or less clear to you with crops, and with scammers too. Be careful, double-check everything, and don’t rush to pay.

The conclusion I made for myself: sowing is only free, through an offer. I don't want to pay for bots anymore. There are practically no worthy communities for paid posting of rock music posts. And for those that exist, it’s easier to target their active audience and get real likes and engagements, for which no one pays people.

What follows from this is this: I only believe in targeted advertising. It is expensive. 1000 impressions cost at least 30 rubles. If you want to show your track to a million people, it will cost you 33,000 rubles. You can spread this amount over three months and somehow live with it.

Use services to work with audiences like Targethunter. Get decent training on target. Personally, this helped me a lot to understand the issue. Learn to gather audiences and test different creatives on them. The more you dive into this topic, the thicker the partisans become. It turns out that creatives burn out, audiences run out and also burn out, promotion starts at first, then stops, there is a cheap audience, and there is an expensive and more active one. You won’t show an ad to an expensive audience for 30 rubles. The contact will show her ads from other advertisers.

What do we end up with? What you are doing is the most expensive and thankless type of advertising - brand advertising. You create the so-called “awareness” - people’s awareness that you exist. Here you were not, but here you are and people know about you. These are two very big differences.

Brand advertising is a constant work with the audience. You constantly have to spend money on it. Not every time you have a new album, every two years, but a little every day.

Your public wall should be updated with news every day or several days. People are accustomed to reality shows and you either drag them into yours, or someone else will drag them in and you and your creativity will not reach anywhere.

Get used to the idea that this is a marathon, a long game. Be prepared to spend time and/or money distributing your music. Be it public or target offers. If you find a cool paid public page with an active audience and you have money for it, great, work with it constantly.

What definitely doesn’t work is one-time activity, bursts of advertising campaigns, if you don’t actively run a social network, don’t build your media image, then working with targets and one-time seedings is all a waste of money.

Only constant and methodical work, better in small steps, so as not to overstrain yourself.

Try this: for one year, methodically hammer away at different public sites with your creativity, constantly releasing new tracks, and see what happens in a year.

Good luck!

PS Some examples from real life.

Here's a target guy writing with a portfolio that's completely fucked up.

Next, a guy with a bot farm writes, the public pages are full of shkolota. Some have discussions, because... provocative content and schoolchildren hang out there. But we all know that schoolchildren don’t listen to rock music and don’t buy merch. That's why the dude goes to the ban.

Here is an example of a letter from a real community network administrator. I can’t say anything bad about them, nor can I say anything good. Large and stupid communities with an incomprehensible audience. A similar network of publics was cut when uploaded to the Republic of Kazakhstan, as I already explained above in the text. For now, it’s more profitable for me to gather an active audience from this network and show the target directly. On average 2.5-3 times more profitable. I think you know how to count money.

Well, this is a classic, I just found it in messages some time later. It turns out they wrote before, I just didn’t have a release in hand before and I didn’t fall for it.

And these are the prices for the work of a real targetologist per month. I won’t say anything bad, well done girl, for only 12,000 rubles you can easily buy a decent training on target, which, together with this article, will put your brains from your ass to your head. Pay once, use for life. Profit.

The cost of posting in a decent, live public.