This Is My Jam, a service that allows its users to share their current favorite song with anyone who might be interested in their musical preferences, has announced it will no longer accept new “jams” after early-to-mid September.
The site debuted in 2011 as a small project inside The Echo Nest, a music intelligence company acquired by Spotify in March 2014. This Is My Jam was not part of that acquisition; it struck out on its own six months earlier, but as The Echo Nest is known for doing some pretty interesting things with music listening data, plenty of people kept there eyes on this company.
This Is My Jam’s founders say in their announcement that they will make the service’s data available to both users and developers in a variety of formats, that they plan to open-source much of its underlying code, and that they will keep an archived version of the site online so anyone can view its history.
The archive will consist of a little more than 2 million “jams” shared by the 200,000 users the site attracted in the four years it’s been running. That isn’t a lot by today’s standards, where something isn’t viral unless it’s used by a million people, but then, the site was kept relatively small almost by design.
The startup was a direct response to the rise of automated services that claimed to know what people liked based on how often a song was played. As co-founder Matthew Ogle told Pando in 2012: “[E]specially in the face of Facebook taking scrobbling mainstream with Spotify, it really [feels] like everything [is] being reduced to ‘just listened,’ auto-generated hype charts, and bland Youtube links shared in feed after endless feed.” This Is My Jam was to serve as a counterpoint to those tools.
It’s a compelling, romantic idea. Apple has taken a similar tack with its own services by having real, live human beings find the best news, music, and software instead of relying on the massive amounts of data available to it. Others have done the same thing — we’re living in highly-curated times.
Yet most of those services rely on hiring people to curate something that others consume. This Is My Jam flipped that on its head by asking everyone to curate everything for themselves, and while a small number of people were enthusiastic in “jamming” something each week, many others were not.
Ogle shared some information about This Is My Jam’s usage in an email to Gigaom: “Overall activity had declined a bit over the last year; most months somewhere between 5-10 percent of our users would pop in to post at least one jam,” he said, adding that the launch of new features “offset this somewhat.”
That worked for a while. But in the face of a changing landscape defined by many companies vying for control of the music streaming market, the shift from desktop computers to smartphones, and increasingly complex licensing issues, This Is My Jam’s co-founders have decided it’s time to call it quits.
“First and foremost, it feels like we’ve explored This Is My Jam’s original mission best we could,” Ogle and co-founder Hannah Donovan say in their announcement. “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.”
When I asked how much it might cost to run This Is My Jam when it becomes a “read-only time capsule” next month, Ogle said that most of the service’s costs are associated with all the “moving parts” required to post new “jams.” Without those costs, he said, the archived service will be “very affordable.”
As others have pointed out, This Is My Jam is winding down the right way: by making sure all the data shared by its 200,000 users is available to them, in some manner, for the foreseeable future. Now it’s up to other companies to show that music sharing is about more than play counts and YouTube videos.
Oh, and in case anyone else is tempted to make a joke about This Is My Jam becoming “These Are Our Preserves” or something else, like I was, Ogle said in his email that a friend has already offered the site a new domain — thiswasmyjam.com — but we’ll have to wait and see if they end up using it.
Despite impending shutdown, ‘This Is My Jam’ to preserve user data originally published by Gigaom, © copyright 2015.
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