Week 880

Week beginning Monday, 24th November 2025.

We’ve spent the week mostly working on jam.coop and doing a little bit of business development.

Jam

We currently use Stripe to take payments on jam, but when we want to transfer the money to the artist that made the music, we use Wise. This is confusing for our users, and causes unnecessary manual work for us. Since doing the initial burst of work on jam Stripe’s Connect product is more widely available and powerful. James has been poring over the docs and spiking various approaches to how we might be able to use Stripe Connect to automatically transfer money to jam’s artists when they make a sale. Working out the nuances of “merchant of record” status has been challenging, but we think it’ll make things much easier to run in the long run and potentially allow us to start selling things like Vinyl, CDs and T-shirts on behalf of our artists.

We had a very productive session brainstorming ideas for how to increase awareness of jam. We based the session on Gabriel Weinberg’s Bullseye method and have a bunch of ideas that we’d like to test.

We’ve also been working on adding support for record labels, and doing a small redesign of the homepage so that it features more hand-made and less ai-generated artwork. I find making these kind of opinionated aesthetic or philosophical decisions quite hard but as my friend pointed out - if jam was a bricks-and-mortar record shop, we’d also get to decide what went in the shop window.

In other news

Chris spent some time on our project to redirect broken rubyforge.org URLs. He looked at the log data we’ve gathered so far and updated some Fastly VCL rules based on this analysis and some pull requests we received.

We enjoyed catching up with Polly for a very useful conversation about business plans and grant funding. We also sat down with our friend Graham to compare notes on finding work, pricing work and doing work.

We’re currently on the look out for projects large or small so do drop us a line if you’d like a chat.