In a statement posted on the site, the founders shared:
After nearly a year assessing many options, we’ve decided to stop operating This Is My Jam in its current form…
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…
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 onstable 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.
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