Jamglue, 2006-2010: A Retrospective
You're looking back in time: Jamglue ran from 2006 to 2010. This page is a retrospective built from the public record.
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You're Here: Jamglue \> A Retrospective, 2006–2010
1. Upload or Record your own Tracks 2. Create an original Mix or personalize someone else's in our simple online Mixer 3. Show off your music: email it, embed it, or just sit back and let the Jamglue community discover your talent!
The mix page: the embeddable player, remix lineage, and the tracks inside the mix, with the MC Lars contest in the sidebar.
Your mother always said you had talent.
Hot music and cool people (or vice versa).
Cause it obviously needs more cowbell.
With your mouse out.
The welcome icons and slogans, exactly as they read in December 2006.
TRY THE ORIGINAL SWF MIXER TRY THE WEB AUDIO RECREATION
The Flash mixer in full, November 2007: “Spongebob’s F.U.N. Song” mid-mix: per-track volume, pan, and solo/mute with automation, tempo sync across sources. Audio streamed from Amazon S3. Both mixers run today with the recovered T-Pain stems: the recreation, or the original, emulated.
TRY THE ORIGINAL SWF MIXER TRY THE WEB AUDIO RECREATION
Press
"So I woke up this morning with an urge to remix something myself. And the perfect tool is a new service called Jamglue." Oct 2006
"Simple, streamlined and easy to use interface." Nov 2006
"Incredibly easy for talentless people like me to create a mix that actually sounds pretty good." Nov 9, 2006
"The board is a lot slicker than its Splicemusic counterpart." Dec 15, 2006
"Anyone who fancies themselves a musician can go in, press a 'remix' button, and add their own tracks." May 14, 2007
"Jamglue takes advantage of teenagers' penchant to personalize everything." Jun 2007
"Combining some seriously cool remix contests with an exemplary online music collaboration platform." Nov 2, 2007
Remix Contests
Artists released real studio stems under Creative Commons licenses, and fans traded verses with the stars, rapping and singing over the originals. All 31 recovered contests, in order; dates are each contest’s first appearance in the Wayback Machine.
The Submarines · Dec 2006: “Peace and Hate,” the launch contest, with Nettwerk.
MC Lars · Apr 2007: “White Kids Aren't Hyphy”; Lars picked the winner himself.
Coldcut · May 2007: Remix Showcase.
R. Kelly · Jul 2007: “Double Up”: a duet on “I'm a Flirt,” presented with Jive.
T-Pain · Aug 2007: remix or rhyme along with “Bartender.”
Blue Scholars · Sep 2007
Public Enemy · Oct 2007: remix “Amerikan Gangster”; grand prize picked by Chuck D.
Jars of Clay · Oct 2007: “Love Came Down at Christmas,” with Nettwerk.
The Perishers · Oct 2007
Hi-Tek · Jan 2008: guest-verse contest for “My Piano.”
JR Writer · Jan 2008
Tigarah · Jan 2008
Dolla · Apr 2008: “Who the F\* is That?” remix contest.
“Your Week” · May 2008: TV theme-song contest with WETA and reddit.
Tyga · May 2008
Kidz in the Hall · Jul 2008
Natasha Bedingfield · Oct 2008
Shontelle · Oct 2008
Mirror's Edge · Nov 2008: EA game-soundtrack tie-in.
B-Real · Feb 2009
Charlie Wilson · Apr 2009
UGK · Apr 2009
Grand Puba · Jun 2009
U-God · Jun 2009
J-Kwon · Jun 2009
Jah · Jun 2009
GS Boyz · Jul 2009
Mams Taylor · Sep 2009
Hopsin · Sep 2009
Wiz Khalifa · Nov 2009
Bamboo Shoots · Mar 2010
Plus the site-wide events: “Best of Jamglue” remix rounds and the Valentine’s Day remix-card campaign.
The Community
What people said while it was live, and when it went dark. Verbatim, spelling and emoticons preserved; each row links to its source, live or archived.
TechCrunch comments · Dec 15, 2006
"Y Combinator has another winner at hand!" – SupportMagic
TechCrunch comments · Dec 15, 2006
"The JamGlue tool is very useful and would provide an alternative to apples garageband. Hopefully the online tracks library will become more comprehensive over time. The flash interface is cutting edge. Keep up the great work." – wayne lambright
"Alive: Weebly, Virtualmin, Jamglue, Scribd, Pairwise \[…\] anywhere.fm, Xobni, i'm in like with you, Justin.tv" – usurper, on which YC companies were still going
"i first heard of jamglue on a random NPR piece eons ago, and as far as interface and mix-ability goes, it rocks. but the user-base seems to be 99.7% rap oriented \[…\]" – garfy3
"wow, that site is crazy!" – Chrono
"So sad :(" – Bret Taylor
"I shall wear my t-shirt tomorrow in memoriam." – Jonathan Le Plastrier
"Jamglue is one of ma fave sites mehn. I get my beats from there. I don't know any other site that can be that good" – Genuflect
"Yeah! I miss Jamglue so bad!!! Its affecting my job. Please, does anybody know any good site where u can download Instrumentals, acapellas e.t.c?? Please help!!" – bjmighty
The Story
Gautam Jayaraman and Casey Muller were in a band together at MIT. After graduating in 2003 they moved to distant cities, and got excited about distance collaboration, and about applying an "open source" model to making music. Building began in June 2006: Gautam, Casey and Matt Rubens went through Y Combinator's summer batch while co-founder Divya Bhat held things down in Seattle, building Jamglue alongside her PhD work. After the batch the team converged on Seattle. The site launched publicly on December 15, 2006 out of a private beta of 2,500 members, at a time when Y Combinator’s entire investment was $18,000.
"Why isn't there a hugely popular user-generated content community like YouTube for audio? Music is a fundamentally collaborative form of media."
Matt Rubens, interview with Rex Dixon, Dec 2006
"We've had people trading verses with major artists, rapping and singing, and we've had skilled DJs who take a hit song and completely rework it with fresh beats they made."
Divya Bhat, Creative Commons interview, Nov 2007
| Jan 31, 2006 | jamglue.com registered. | | ------------ | -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- | | Mar 6, 2006 | Y Combinator says yes: “no paperwork, just a brief chat.” | | May 18, 2006 | Jamglue officially incorporated; full-time development underway. | | Jun 6, 2006 | Y Combinator’s Summer Founders Program begins ($18k). | | Sep 20, 2006 | Private beta opens. | | Dec 15, 2006 | Public launch: “Remixing for the Masses” on TechCrunch. Launch remix contest with Nettwerk and The Submarines. | | Feb 22, 2007 | Robert Scoble comes by the Capitol Hill office to tape the ScobleShow demo (published March 30). | | Mar 9, 2007 | SXSW Interactive, Austin: Matt on “People-Powered Products” (Mar 11), Casey on “Music From the Masses: The Remix Revolution” (Mar 13). | | Apr 26, 2007 | The AWS scaling talk at Amazon’s Start-up Project, Seattle. | | May 14, 2007 | NPR Morning Edition airs “The Submarines, Jamglue and Online Music Collaboration.” | | May 15, 2007 | Coldcut Remix Showcase with Ninja Tune, the first major-label contest. | | Nov 2, 2007 | 75,000+ members, hundreds of thousands of remixes. | | Jan 17, 2009 | The blog announces the milestone: over one million registered users and two million mixes made. | | May 5, 2010 | The site goes dark. “Jamglue.com has shut down. Thanks for all your support.” |
The Team
From left: Casey Muller, Divya Bhat, Gautam Jayaraman, and Matt Rubens. Seed funding and invaluable advice from Y Combinator.
Where they went next
Gautam and Divya co-founded Rickshaw (YC W14) together; Gautam later co-founded Onsite Pro (YC S21), and Divya served as a Visiting Partner at Y Combinator. Casey joined FriendFeed (acquired by Facebook), then Quip (acquired by Salesforce), founded Bevel (YC F3), and then spent seven years working at Y Combinator itself. Matt co-founded Kickball Labs, the studio behind Sketchfu.com, and then Roomote (formerly Roo Code).
Beyond the founders
Designer Chip Rogers drew the site: the logos, the graphics, and every remix contest banner on this page. David Todd advised the company from the first label contests through the end.
Site Technology
Ruby on Rails, MySQL, and memcache behind a Flash mixer, part of the original S3 and EC2 beta programs, scaling on AWS back when that was a novelty. As told at Amazon’s Start-up Project event in Seattle, April 2007 (and written up by O’Reilly Radar).
Scaling on AWS, in four phases
1. Audio files in S3. Uploads mirrored to S3; downloads went through Jamglue servers for a permission check, then an authenticated redirect with a 5-minute expiring URL. The Flash players used the same mechanism. 2. User avatars in S3. Bucket `images.jamglue.com`, CNAME’d straight to S3, no server hit at all. 3. All static content in S3. Bucket `static.jamglue.com`: every stylesheet, script, logo, and SWF. 4. Mixdowns on EC2. Rendering a mix pulled the source tracks from S3, mixed them down with ecasound (driven from Rails through libecasoundc), and uploaded the MP3 back, entirely inside AWS, so no bandwidth charges.
The AWS bill, as told on stage
Pre-launch: about $1.50 a month. Private beta: about $15. Launch: about $150. April 2007, traffic doubling monthly: about $600.
By April 2007
110K visitors and 1.1M pageviews a month; over 100,000 audio files streamed or downloaded a day; traffic scaled 10× with no new hardware.
Phase three outlived the company: every contest banner on this page was recovered from `static.jamglue.com`, still quietly serving, nineteen years later.
August 16, 2006: a rack server, a suitcase, and sweatshirts for padding. The first Jamglue servers came from reddit after their acquisition, colocated in Boston, then flown across the country as checked luggage during scheduled downtime. Thanks, reddit.
The Site Through the Years
Homepage captures from the Wayback Machine, launch to shutdown. Click any thumbnail for a larger view.
Dec 2006 · launch
Jul 2007 · R. Kelly contest
Jun 2008 · "Your Week" TV contest
Sep 2009 · B-Real contest
Apr 2010 · the last spring
And the founders' own profile pages, one per era. Click for a larger view:
matt · Sep 2007
divya · Jun 2008
casey · Feb 2009
gautam · Mar 2010
And one small seasonal takeover, the February 2007 Valentine's Day choirs, lovers versus haters:
The Lovers' Choir · Feb 2007
The Anti-Valentine Choir · Feb 2007
From the Blog
Twenty-four posts from blog.jamglue.com survive in the Wayback Machine, and one more survives only as a syndicated excerpt. A few favorites; each links to the archived post:
Nov 10, 2006 by Matt Rubens
Crunched and Mashed We at Jamglue would like to give a warm welcome to all of our new users who read about us on TechCrunch (Who Are the Y Combinator Companies?) and Mashable (Jamglue To Launch Awesome Remixing Community) today!
Jan 18, 2007 by divyab
Submarines Contest Winners! I would like to announce the winners of Jamglue’s very first remix competition! … When we called upon our users to vote for their favorites, they spoke up, exhibiting excellent taste!
May 15, 2007 by divyab
NPR Morning Edition: The Submarines, Jamglue, and Online Music Collaboration!! This morning, NPR’s Morning Edition did a segment on online music collaboration! … We were very excited that Morning Edition was able to tell America about Jamglue, and we are huge fans of the show.
Jun 1, 2007 by divyab
Collaborate with R. Kelly on Jamglue! Ever wanted to collaborate with the King of R&B? Now’s your chance!!! To commemorate the release of R. Kelly’s new album “DOUBLE UP”, we have partnered with Jive Records to bring you this super cool contest.
Aug 22, 2007 by divyab
T-Pain Contest Launches! We are so excited about this contest, and have had an overwhelming response from fans so far, with over 450 entries started in just 2 weeks!
Oct 4, 2007 by divyab
Public Enemy on Jamglue! Jamglue and Public Enemy announce The Amerikan Gangster Remix Contest, inviting fans to remix the group’s new single! The winners will be personally chosen by Public Enemy frontman Chuck D and longtime producer Gary G-Wiz.
Mar 19, 2008 by divyab
What’s Poppin’? Apologies to all the faithful readers of the Jamglue Blog - but no news has been great news! … Since our last post back in November, the Jamglue community has almost quadrupled!
Jan 17, 2009 by the Jamglue team
Milestones, Maps and Mixes! "Last week, we surpassed 1,000,000 registered users! … Also not long ago, we celebrated our 2,000,000th mix created … in the past month, over 980,000 people have visited." This post is lost from the Wayback Machine; its text survives only in a syndication digest.
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Jamglue.com has shut down. Thanks for all your support.
Rebuilt from the Wayback Machine, the original static.jamglue.com S3 bucket, and contemporaneous press · Y Combinator: Jamglue (S06) · the tombstone