This Is My Jam
The business, the turning points, and the decisions behind them.
01 / WHAT IT BUILT
What the company did
This Is My Jam was a music sharing website founded in 2011 by Matthew Ogle and Hannah Donovan, who formed it inside music data company The Echo Nest and spun it out. Users posted one current favorite song at a time (their jam), building a feed of hand-picked music from friends. The service grew to 200,000 users who shared more than 2 million jams.
02 / This Is My Jam FAILURE REASONS
Failure reasons
This Is My Jam was squeezed out by the shift to app-based streaming and the fragility of web embeds. As listening consolidated into streaming apps, usage of the open-web model slowed; keeping the service alive depended on YouTube, SoundCloud and others, whose breaking API changes consumed all of the founders' maintenance time. Tighter licensing and geographic controls made playback fail more often, and after assessing options for nearly a year the team archived the site in September 2015.
03 / EVENT HISTORY
Events in the structured record
- Company founded
Matthew Ogle and Hannah Donovan founded This Is My Jam, spinning it out of The Echo Nest to let people share their current favorite song.
- Closure announced
In August 2015 the founders announced the service would stop operating in its current form; on September 26, 2015 it became a read-only time capsule, with user data exportable and code open-sourced on GitHub.
04 / CONTEMPORARY REBUILD ASSESSMENT
Difficulty of rebuilding this project today
Material for this section is being gathered and checked. It will appear here once ready.
Overall assessment: Not completed
05 / CAUSAL CHAIN
How the factors connect
- 01
Launch a one-song-at-a-time music sharing site in 2011.
- 02
Grow to 200,000 users sharing over 2 million hand-picked jams.
- 03
Watch open-web music use shrink as streaming consolidates into apps and APIs break.
- 04
Archive the site as a read-only time capsule in September 2015.