Hannah Donovan & Matthew Ogle – Rebel rebel: a case study on taking the opposite approach

This talk was the shortest of the day, but due to the lightning fast patter of the Canadian duo presenting, it was jam packed with interesting takeaways. The aforementioned Canucks are Hannah Donovan and Matthew Ogle, formerly of LastFM and more recently the co-founders of This is my jam.

Hannah and Matt see the 2 main problems with online music as being Access & Discovery. The music services which have appeared on the scene have usually attempted to solve just one of these. Think Napster as a tool to access music or iTunes Match as a tool to discover new music. Matt framed this as ‘1st order’ vs ‘2nd order’. In this paradigm ‘1st order’ represents infrastructure and the needs of the user while ‘2nd order’ represents community and the user’s playful wants.

Our duo wanted to create a service that solved both of these problems whilst simultaneously tapping into the rich visual culture of music and avoiding the ‘spreadsheet music’ served up by Spotify and iTunes. They also learned from the cyclical nature of fashion, citing a nice example of skinny and baggy jeans constantly swapping places as the trouser du jour over the last 5 decades.

At times the talk seemed a little cheesy but that was probably due to my inability to tell the difference between a carefully put together pun and genuine spontaneity between the pair. They have found success in their previous work and will no doubt do the same in the future. This is my jam lets you choose just 1 song, a handpicked favourite rather than a playlist of thousands, I found this to be a really cool idea and one I hope takes  off.

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