Digital good (direct electronic payments in the hands of musicians, artists and other creators)

For specialists: there is nothing revolutionary in fasting. The article will be useful to people who are not particularly sophisticated in information technology, for example, musicians.

For many years, everyone is waiting for the full arrival of PayPal in Russia. I think many have noticed that finally , it happened . But the question immediately arises: “Why do we really need this PayPal?”. The question is fair, given the availability of services such as WebMoney, Yandex.Money, Visa Qiwi Wallet, ROBOKASSA and others.

There is such a wonderful person as Fedor Chistyakov (leader of the “Zero” and “Chistyakov-Band” groups). In his blog, he wrote a post about PayPal from the point of view of a musician . At his personal request, I decided to write this post on Habré. I will talk about musicians, but all this can be shifted to other areas of culture.

Lyrical digression ...
Most of the people who are engaged in creativity, this creativity live. And in order to have something to live, they need to somehow earn. The main thing that comes to mind is the monetization of this very creativity. Previously, everything happened through various labels, which published records on disks and engaged in their distribution. But someone is inconvenient to buy discs, someone does not want to pay for them, and indeed this content distribution system is outdated. At the same time, many people are very worried about this and are pushing all sorts of marasmic laws on banning the Internet and criminal prosecution for songs downloaded (world and Russian experience). In fact, good musicians either like the fact that the fruits of their work are available to those who wish on the Internet, or they cannot do anything about it and do not survive ( Boris Grebenshchikov , Yuri Shevchuk spoke about piracy in their interviews), and many admirers of their work want musicians thank and support. But at the same time, there is no desire to feed incomprehensible intermediaries in the form of frantic copywriters. In the conditions of the modern world, content can already be distributed directly from the creator - to the consumer.

In 2008, the “ Circles ” project appeared in RuNet, which provided the musicians with a technical platform and a legal basis for receiving donations in gratitude for their music. Then, thanks to Sergey Vasilyev from the Auktyon group, a simpler opportunity appeared - the PayForArt widget, which can be simply installed on any site for a symbolic amount.
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But there were a few basic questions:

• the desire to sell on your site, and not through third-party services;
• technical complexity - musicians are non-technical people, they are engaged in creative work, it is often difficult for them to place a widget on the site;
• unwillingness of listeners to pay intermediaries - people want to pay directly to musicians and do not understand why they should pay someone else;
• the difficulty of registration, withdrawal of money and the commission of payment systems.

Now to the point :)

From September 16, 2013, the world-famous payment system PayPal began to work with rubles and Russian banks . The advantage of it is that it is very easy to connect to your site.

I quote Fedor Chistyakov:

Well, someone might ask, so what is so special about it? What we do not have our own payment systems? Yes full! Yandex Money, Web Money, etc.
Yes, it is, but there is one important point. Under all these systems you can’t do anything without a programmer. The connection process is not technically simple, and the road store systems are cumbersome, .... For example, did you try to connect to WebMoney? I spent a total of half a month on this. And now, if I don’t touch this box for a month, then I forget everything, lose these electronic keys that need to be hidden away, and I hide them too far, endless checks, captcha entries, codes on a mobile phone. Stress . And the main thing is that on a dime. In general, all this is too difficult.
...
The system of connection to PayPal is so developed that the process of connecting the store to the system occurs simply by entering your own email, and connecting the bank ... I was surprised, not to say shocked, I was only asked for the BIC and the account number .
Fedor Chistyakov's blog

At first, I thought that Fedor, with simplicity, was a bit crafty - you still need to find this free shop, or still install one of the plug-ins on WordPress naked (for example, WooCommerce or WP e-Commerce ). ROBOKASSA, for example, is also not particularly difficult to connect to WordPress via the WooCommerce plugin. But it turned out that he himself uses the Easy Digital Downloads plugin, and for a reason. Why not WooCommerce? Because it is too bulky and adds extra pages to the site. And Easy Digital Downloads just does its job - it allows you to accept payments through PayPal for albums and tracks sold.

But in any case, to receive payments directly, the following actions are not very complicated:

1. • Take a free store on WordPress, which has PayPal out of the box;
   • or install WordPress + WooCommerce (or another plugin).
   
   
2. Go through a simple registration process with PayPal (or ROBOKASSA).
3. Profit!

You can see how it looks on his site (not advertising, link to a free album, but getting the album through the PayPal basket).

I would like to note that PayForArt is a useful and convenient service. If you do not want to fool around, you can use it. But it is not particularly tuned in appearance, it will not look organically on any website. “Circles” is a great service, but, unfortunately, for a user with a smartphone, both options are not easy to overcome the purchase process. At the same time, the opportunity on the personal site to accept money directly (without commissions for withdrawal and intermediaries) is difficult to overestimate. I am sure that modern opportunities for direct payments (without unnecessary intermediaries) will allow listeners to support their favorite authors and performers more actively.

Let's popularize direct sales as a kind of interaction with the audience among authors, performers and listeners - we will change the ancient way of life and throw copywriters to the curb of progress , they themselves will not jump from cash flows.

Clarification about PayPal: in order for a client to pay via PayPal, he does not need to have a PayPal account, you can simply use a plastic card.

PS Through PayPal, you can withdraw money through a "personal" account to the account of the FE. Accordingly, if I pay the simplified taxation system (6%) and contributions to the funds (about 30 thousand rubles a year), then they will definitely be clean before the law, full and cheerful. PayPal allows you to withdraw money to a regular account of an individual. But I highly recommend consulting with experts when withdrawing funds in this way. I met different opinions. Some say that you can only withdraw to the account of the IP. Others say that you can withdraw to the account of the physical person, but you must pay the tax as a PI. But in any case, if you are not an entrepreneur, it will be illegal entrepreneurship, which entails a certain responsibility.

PPS I ask about errors and inaccuracies to write in a personal - I will correct everything :)

UPD . If there are questions to Fedor, then filtering out the questions on adequacy, ask them to him, and then update the post as answers are received.
UPD2 . Slightly changed the answers in the survey, expanding them. Voices cast remained in place :)
UPD3 . The comments write that in a short time through Yandex.Money it will be possible to pay with plastic cards without binding. It's fine.