Mavrix: Music + Data
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Anand Bakshi’s Generation-Spanning Work
[Starting this week, we’ll re-publish here the Bollywood Retrospective series published in DNA blogs. This post was originally published here.] This post is based on a question posed a few years ago on Twitter by film historian Pavan Jha, a passionate follower and chronicler of films and film music. The question – “Name the 5…
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1930s Hindi Film Music – Now Available on MySwar
We had promised in February to complete the task of cataloguing the first decade of Hindi film music, starting with “Alam Ara” (1931), by April. We’re happy to report that the task is done right on time. MySwar now lists all the films released between 1931 and 1940 and their songs. At this point, the data for film…
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MySwar Updates
We’ve been busy making MySwar better these past few months and although we’re far from done, it’s a good time to review two of these updates: A few months ago, we started entering information for Hindi films released between 1931 and 1940. In a first pass, we entered the most important films released in this decade – films like…
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2016 Bollywood Music Review and Top 20 Songs
As in the past, critics were not happy with the state of Hindi film music in 2016. The charge – yet again – was that it Hindi films were using an “assembly line” approach to create songs using multiple composers and re-packaging hit songs from the past. One thing is certain – music is no…
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Change in MySwar domain
Earlier this week, some of us observed that myswar.com was inaccessible. We had recently moved to a new hosting provider and our first thought was that it was an issue at their end. Further investigation, however, revealed that we were most likely the target of a court order that had ISPs blocking our website. The…
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The Top 100 Hindi Film Songs Of 2015
As 2015 draws to a close, it is time to revisit the best songs of the year. This is the first draft of the year’s top 100 songs based on rankings on MySwar. We will finalize the rankings in a few weeks. This list excludes singles released recently for which the album will likely not…
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MySwar Mobile Web Version Now Available
Over the last few weeks, we rolled out mobile web updates to the MySwar website. When you access myswar.co from a mobile device, you’ll see an easy-to-navigate, mobile-friendly version. Almost every feature available available on the desktop website is available in the mobile web version. While the UI is different, the flow is very similar to the flow…
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Thoughts On Amit Trivedi’s “Bombay Velvet”
This is not a review of Amit Trivedi’s Bombay Velvet. I loved the album to bits and wanted to share a few things that stood out for me as I was listening to it: It struck me as a rare album in that it is so thematically consistent. We hear Neeti Mohan’s voice in six…
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MySwar App Now Available In Hindi
Updated on Mar 12, 2015: The MySwar Android app is also available in Hindi now. A little more than a year ago, we had announced the availability of content on MySwar in Hindi in addition to English. We finally got to roll out an update that makes Hindi content available on the MySwar iOS app and the…
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2014 Bollywood Music Review
2014 was not a great year for Hindi film music. The Indian Express carried a bleak piece discussing the death of Hindi film music in 2014. We have observed the rise of multi-composer albums and albums riding on one or two item songs for a few years now. This trend continued in 2014. The other…
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