Jam Preserves
Hello! Matt & Han here with an important message about Jam.
After nearly a year assessing many options, we’ve decided to stop operating This Is My Jam in its current form. Read on to learn about why the two of us have made this decision, but first:
1. Your jams are not going away
2. Thank you thank you for turning this crazy online music experiment into a community; good vibes and great tunes made every week worth it 💝
We hate it when projects we love go dark, so we’re taking a different approach and archiving Jam the best possible way we can manage. We want to preserve your jams, and we want to celebrate all 2+ million songs and the people who curated them between 2011–2015. We know this is no replacement for an operational Jam, but we’re making this archive as sweet as we can, and we’re actually kind of excited about trying to Preserve Things The Right Way online.
Wait So What’s Happening Exactly
This Is My Jam will become a read-only time capsule in September. This means you won’t be able to post anymore, but you’ll be able to browse a new archive version of the site.
You’ll be able to explore all the people and music that made Jam, and listen to everyone’s jams as Spotify playlists as well. Think of it as the best record collection you’ve ever walked through, like this, curated by some of the best tastemakers we know (aka you!).
Your profile data (jams, loves, etc) will also be exportable in a few formats, including text lists; the read-only API will stay online for developers who want to play; we’ll also be open sourcing as much code as we can on Github. And if you don’t want to take part, that’s cool, you can opt out or change what data you want to preserve in your settings. (More about data in the FAQ).
Why We’re Doing It
First and foremost, it feels like we’ve explored This Is My Jam’s original mission best we could. We’re ready to free up our evenings and weekends for new ideas and projects, while hopefully doing good by the thing that made Jam great: the 200,000 of you who shared more than two million hand-picked songs over the last four years, week after week. Whew. It’s been a serious privilege discovering music with you all.
tl;dr product nerd edition:
We started Jam in 2011, and since then the online music landscape has shifted dramatically – both in terms of how people listen to music and the ecosystem it exists in. This created three challenges for us recently:
Fractures in the services we rely on. In 2014, with the site on stable tech footing, the two of us decided to take new gigs and work on an upgraded, sponsorable version of Jam as a side-project that could become self-sustaining. But keeping the jams flowing doesn’t just involve our own code; we interoperate with YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter, Facebook, The Hype Machine, The Echo Nest, Amazon, and more. Over the last year, changes to those services have meant instead of working on Jam features, 100% of our time’s been spent updating years-old code libraries and hacking around deprecations just to keep the lights on. The trend is accelerating with more breaking/shutting off each month, soon exceeding our capacity to fix it.
Product fit in a changing ecosystem. We founded This Is My Jam at the height of the Music Hack Day era, a time when more and more services were starting to offer web-embeddable audio and video. Capitalizing on this trend, we helped unify these experiences to enable beautiful song sharing regardless of platform. But as these platforms matured and consolidated, streams moved from the web into apps, and more sophisticated licensing and geographic controls meant “sorry, this cannot be played here” messages became the norm rather than the exception. Online music habits change quickly, and our specific approach doesn’t suit today’s users very well.
Shift to mobile. Should be no big deal, right? Unfortunately, rules around mobile streaming are very different from web streaming, prohibitively so. We spent our initial funding on the web version of Jam, and felt doing mobile properly would require a total product reboot, something we weren’t in a position to do at the time. Since 2012 we’ve also watched nearly a dozen different companies attempt mobile single-song sharing apps. While none have taken off quite yet, we really hope that one of them will! It would be genuinely exciting to see a new player pick up the torch.
All The Hugs
Okay, we need a lot of these! Jam wouldn’t have lifted off without the hard work and inventiveness of original developers Andreas and Ralph, and contributions from Ben and Aanand; IFTFOM for life. Thank you to The Echo Nest for giving us our start; Brian, Jim, and Dave, you guys are the very best (and Brian, sorry for stealing your domain). Love to Anthony and the Hype Machine crew for bouncing many ideas and a sweet integration that helped us get started. Props to Dermot, Mark, Van and Shannon at MTV for giving us work when we needed it the most bootstrapping Jam. Thanks to the friends and mentors who advised along the way; Fred, Anthony, Nat, and to the people who helped us get Proper Business done; Robin and Mia, Gregor and Sachin at Reed Smith, Bruce, Miles and Lou. And to those of you who helped us shape this plan and let us bounce ideas over a drink, you are the #realtalk; Kristen, Joanna, James, Matt, Matthew, Dan, Arkadiy and Sam. Last but not least, thank you to the friends and passionate music fans who have unconditionally jumped on board with all the music projects we’ve ever got involved with (yes even that one) and kicked the tires. There are too many of you to list, but we know who you are. The things we make wouldn’t be as fun or as good without your curiosity, passionate feedback and of course, bug reports ;-)
Onwards! Meet you back here for a final update in September when we’ve got an archive to show you. In the meantime, we’ll be answering any immediate questions that come up over in the FAQ. If you have one that we haven’t answered yet, hit us up on Twitter.
Love,
Matt & Han
PS. Matt made a video inspired by the number of times we said “jam” in this post
I was a sporadic This is My Jam user over the years as it always felt a bit like shouting into the void (and I have my own site for that). But it was always a smooth uxp and there’s definitely a space waiting to be filled by a single-song sharing app that generates its own playlist/archive as it goes.