Hello friends,
It has been nearly 15 years since we launched MySwar. It has been a labour of love, and I have enjoyed every moment of this journey. I have been gratified by the help, encouragement and support I have recieved from many Hindi film music lovers during this journey.
In the last few years, one of my areas of focus – other than building out exciting new features – has been to make MySwar financially sustainable. To this end, I started publishing the BollySwar book series – a compendium detailing the history of Hindi film music. Available for purchase on Amazon, not only does the book series provide a decade-wise catalogue of Hindi films and songs but also analyses key milestones and trends over time.
In our pursuit of financial sustenance, we also started displaying ads on MySwar last year. Unfortunately, this move did not go well with some users. Taking their feedback on board, I’ve decided to give users the option of a paid subscription to experience MySwar ad-free. Since the value proposition of a subscription for just an ad-free service is limited, I’ll be making the following features accessible only to subscribers:
- Advanced Search
- Text Search
- Tag Search
- Filters in Album and Song Listing
This change will be implemented sometime in the next few days. Some of you may have noticed that we made these features available only to logged-in users a few days ago. As of now, logged-in users do not see any ads. If you haven’t already registered as a MySwar user, I encourage you to do so in order to get a sense of what a subscription service will look like.
After we roll out the subscription service, users without subscriptions will see ads with or without login. Unsubscribed users will be allowed access to the above features for a limited number of times after logging in. They will be prompted to subscribe once their limit is exhausted. Non-subscribers can continue to use the browse and basic search features of MySwar.
A change like this is not easy but I hope you will understand why it is needed and will become MySwar subscribers. I look forward to your support.
Warm regards,
Param
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