Music sites often boast of their libraries of millions of songs, from Google’s 22 million song collection to Last.FM’s gargantuan database of 90m song records.
So social radio site This Is My Jam stands out in how it promotes its redesign, which launched on Thursday. The site, which opened in 2012, lets users post a single song – their “jam” – to their page, sharing their taste with their friends, and then listen to all their friends’ jams with one click. In essence, users can crowdsource the perfect radio playlist, and co-founder Hannah Donovan describes it as “the simplicity of Top 40 radio, but personalised and reimagined for today”.
The redesign lifts some of the restrictions the founders imposed on the site at launch: it introduces a history function, letting users see, and edit, their jams all the way back to when they joined; and it redesigns the song screens, which gel together the social and radio aspects of the site.
But it’s in that feature that Jam’s unique selling point really stands out, since Donovan and her co-founder Matthew Ogle promote it with the heady promise of “half a million new song screens”.
That number sounds remarkably low, but it stems from the site’s approach to music, and to data-driven recommendations in general. As every single song on the network was hand-picked by at least one user as their favourite song of the moment, it can lay a convincing claim to being the best half a million songs in the world.
“The idea is, it’s a small catalogue, but we think it’s the most quality catalogue,” says Donovan.
“And it’s funny,” Ogle adds, “it shows how quickly things have changed. We’re on a world where a catalogue of 500,000 songs is now considered small, compared to the tens of millions that many others offer, but it wasn’t so long ago that a 100 song radio playlist would be a large radio playlist.”
The pair call their approach “notable data,” and argue that it offers a halfway-house between the curation typical of magazines and word-of-mouth recommendations, and the sort of automated “big data” approach of sites such as Last.FM.
The new song screens are an obvious part of that, highlighting the interactions and correlations between various songs on the site. So, for example, the song screen for Taylor Swift’s Shake It Off shares the raw data of how many people have picked it as their Jam, as well as more qualitative info such as users comments; and then it uses the data collected to recommend other hand-picked hits from the library, such as Dolly Parton’s Jolene and Trampled By Turtles’ cover of the Pixies’ Where Is My Mind.
“In a way,” says Ogle, “it’s making visible a lot of the stuff that the community’s doing and building over the last two years, that until now has been largely invisible, simply because we were keeping very closely to that ephemerality. Often people will say ‘oh, Jam’s amazing, I’ve found so much music’, and others will say “how?’ and ‘where?’ It was a bit of a secret club that you had to join.”
This is my Jam began as a “skunkworks” project at music data service The Echo Nest, before being spun-off as an independent company in 2013. Since then, Ogle and Donovan have been bootstrapping the company, though Donovan says that they’re “looking at a bunch of options” for how to proceed in the future.
