Home “This is My Jam” is Like Pinterest for Music

“This is My Jam” is Like Pinterest for Music

You know how it goes. One way or another, you get introduced to a new song, it sticks in your head and you want to share it with your Internet buddies. There are a few ways to go about it. You could find the song on YouTube and post a link to it on Facebook. You could tweet it. If it’s on Spotify or Rdio, you can share it directly with other users or add it to a public playlist.

As effective as these methods can be, they’re not always perfect. With Twitter and Facebook, there’s the risk of having your song get lost in a sea of other social noise. With direct-sharing on Spotify, you can get more granular, but the social experience more or less ends once your friend hits the play button. This new song you just discovered is so awesome, though.

A service that came out of private beta last week hopes to fill this void. This is My Jam lets you share one song at a time, designating that track as your “jam.” You can only have one jam at any given point in time and it expires after one week. This ensures that the content on the site remains recent, rather than allowing outdated tracks from early adopters to rot away on people’s timelines.

This is My Jam has all the basic social features you’d expect: following, liking, commenting and, of course, integration with Facebook and Twitter for sharing songs to a wider audience. When we first played with it, we couldn’t help but feel like the experience was akin to Pinterest, in the sense that it allows users to curate stuff they like and share it among friends.

One of the key differences is in the way the content is deliberately limited on This is My Jam. Instead of building out a page-long archive of past jams, the service just shows a gray, unlinked list of them. The focus here is really on one song per user. In a sense, it’s kind of like the music-obsessed love child of Twitter and Pinterest.

The music on the site comes from various sources across the Web, including YouTube, SoundCloud, the Hype Machine and the Echo Nest. Between the lot of them, there’s a massive library of music to choose from. This approach also largely frees This is My Jam from any messy DMCA legal disputes. The YouTube integration makes the new social service one of the few music sites that includes music from The Beatles and other notoriously digitally-hesitant artists.

The site can also work as a promotional vehicle for new artsits, with some limitations. It lets you upload your own audio files, provided you have the rights to do so, but those tracks don’t automatically get added to the library of music that other users can choose from. Any videos a band or artist has on YouTube, however, can be pulled up and shared as jams.

As you amass a network of friends on This is My Jam, the site becomes a sort of social radio station, kind of like Shufflr.fm, but based on what your friends are into, rather than recommendations from music blog tastemakers.

The site’s audio player is built so that playback continues as you browse through the site. A big yellow button at the top of each user’s homepage allows you play all of the jams of the people you follow. Those tracks can be scrobbled to Last.fm and tracks you like on This is My Jam can be added as favorites on Last.fm as well.

Overall, it’s a promising little Web app, but like any service of this nature, how useful it becomes will depend entirely on its ability to attract users. It’s brand new, so the growth that user base is just getting started.

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