The music curation site This is My Jam says that it is going into a kind “time capsule” mode, starting 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,” My Jam says on its Tumblr blog.
I regret that I never wrote about My Jam. There are so many music curation sites out there that I’ve started to lose track of them. But a portion of the operation’s explanation of why it is suspending itself concerns me:
“In 2014, with the site on stable tech footing, [we] 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.”
This news, along with 8tracks.com’s announcement that it is canceling SoundCloud searchability, underscores the unstable landscape that online music sharing developers face as they access the APIs of larger operations. I thought (and still think) this trend is a great thing, but it obviously comes with many pitfalls.
