“After nearly a year assessing many options, we’ve decided to stop operating This Is My Jam in its current form,” creators Matthew Ogle and Hannah Donovan wrote in a Tumblr post on Sunday. While most other Web services would simply set a deadline after which users’ data would be unavailable, This Is My Jam is taking a much friendlier approach.
The first thing that the service’s creators want users to know is that their jams aren’t going anywhere. Instead the site will, in the creators’ words, “become a read-only time capsule.” Users will no longer be able to post to the site, but everything posted to the site during its four-year lifespan will be there to explore.
As for why the service is shutting down, the creators have this to say: “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 2 million hand-picked songs over the last four years, week after week.”
Of course, there is more to it than that. This Is My Jam relies on a bevy of other websites and services like YouTube, SoundCloud, and Twitter. These services often make changes to their APIs, which means that instead of working on new features, the team behind This Is My Jam is busy making sure that current features still work.
This Is My Jam will go into time capsule mode starting in September. For now the website is still allowing new users to sign up, though it isn’t clear if this will be disabled before September.
In the meantime, if you’re looking for a replacement service, last month we reported on Cymbal, which seems intent on taking up the social music sharing mantle.
