Social music site This Is My Jam is shutting down

The site, which shared over 2 million tracks, will become a read-only time capsule next month

There are so many new music services coming into existence all the time these days that it's almost weird for me  to see one actually disappear.

That is what is happening to social music site This Is My Jam, which announced on Sunday that it will be closing next month.

The idea behind This Is My Jam was for people to be able to share one song at a time. They would pick the one that meant the most to them at that moment, personalize it and keep it for a week. Users could also change the song as often as they wanted, but still only have one at a time, right now and discover which songs truly matter to your friends.

Users were also encouraged to follow others if they liked their music, and then play all of their friends' jams. Over two million tracks were shared since it was founded in 2011.

So what happened? As I said, there are a lot of new music services now, a lot more than there just a few years ago and, "The online music landscape has shifted dramatically – both in terms of how people listen to music and the ecosystem it exists in," Matthew Ogle and Hannah Donovan, co-founders of This Is My Jam, explained the reasons in their blog post. 

Both Ogle and Donovan shifted their attention away from the company in 2014, with Ogle joining Spotify in a product role overseeing their discovery and personalization features, and Donovan becoming Drip’s new Product Design Lead.

They thought that they could run This Is My Jam as a side project, one that would "become self-sustaining."

However, changes to services like YouTube, SoundCloud, Twitter, Amazon, The Echo Nest and others that the site depends on to get its music made that impossible.

"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," they explained. "The trend is accelerating with more breaking/shutting off each month, soon exceeding our capacity to fix it. "

Another problem was the shift toward mobile, which has different rules from streaming on the Web. 

"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," the said.

Going forward, starting in September, the site will become a read-only time capsule, meaning that users will no longer be able to post, but they will be able to browse a new archive version of the site. They will still be able to the site, and listen to jams as Spotify playlists.

Users will also not be losing their data, as it will all be available to be exported.

"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," said Ogle and Donovan.

(Image source: thisismyjam.com)