He will be in charge of expanding Music services within the VK ecosystem as well as building a new single product, VK Music, which is set to launch this year.

The unified VK Music stream will incorporate existing VK music services such as the BOOM application, Music in VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, as well as new products for artists and labels.

Andrey Zakonov, VK Music Services Director:

“Music has always been a major focus of VK — it is available on social networks VKontakte and Odnoklassniki, as well as the BOOM app. Millions of people listen to music on our platforms, and thousands of artists are becoming popular thanks to our services. Our major goal is to bring together artists and music fans. The next natural step is to unite services within VK into a single musical unit, allowing us to focus on establishing a streaming platform and developing tools for musicians.”

Previously, Andrey Zakonov was Yandex's Chief Product Officer for voice assistant Alice, and before that, he was VKontakte's Director of Development and Research for five years, where his team was in charge of the social network's machine learning algorithms and content products. Under Andrey's leadership, the team brought to the market a smart feed, a recommendation section, tools for supporting creators and monetizing content, a podcast platform and other products.

Andrey Zakonov will join the team of Andrey Dimitrov, Vice President for Video Content and Music Services at VK.