The final vote in the database was logged on 24 April 2019. There was no announcement. Somebody (I won’t name them) opened the site, changed a pick, the system saved it, and that was the last vote-event ever recorded against the user18081971 catalogue. The database was four years and one day past launch. It had collected 123,779 vote-events from 1,860 voters (out of 3,200-odd accounts that had ever signed up).
The tail
By mid-2017 the WATMM thread had mostly stopped. The voting hadn’t, but the campaign-peak velocity from May-June 2015 had decayed across thirty months into a small flurry of vote-events a week, then a handful a month. Every so often somebody would post a Reddit thread linking back to the site and there’d be a brief flurry of new accounts; otherwise it was a slow, steady tail. The catalogue had stopped growing at the end of 2015, the SoundCloud had removed almost all tracks in 2016, and there was nothing enticing to drive return visits.
I noticed how quiet it had gotten the hard way. At some point in late 2017 the site broke, a broken library dependency upgrade, I think, and I didn’t notice for nearly a year. When I did notice, in mid-2018, it was because somebody had bumped the WATMM thread:
I had no idea people were still using this. The site has been broken for nearly a year, but I thought nobody cared anymore so didn’t bother to fix it. Looking at the access logs there have been hundreds of people trying to log into it over the past few months (and AFX’s user tried around 11 months ago)… which surprises me… I’ve just fixed the site, it’s now working. Looking at restoring the streaming & waveforms using archive.org mp3’s.
The thing that surprised me was “AFX’s user tried around 11 months ago”. Despite no replies to my SoundCloud messages, he evidently was still interested.
The same account’s final last_login timestamp is 2018-08-03 07:15:10, three days after I posted the “I’ve just fixed the site” reply quoted above. I suspect he lurked on WATMM regularly; Richard logged in one last time, three days after I’d noted in the forums that he’d been trying to log in.
The site ran for approximately 12 more months after that fix, but user activity was almost zero by that point. I let it run. The VPS was inexpensive, Django on a small box, no real load, no reason to take it down, and compared to the cloud infrastructure I was building in my day-job it was nothing. The last vote was in April 2019, and during 2020 I temporarily took the site offline, but kept it running (just not public).
Three things, three endings
The voting site stopped because nobody was voting anymore. Richard had asked on day one that it run “as long as possible to allow people to digest”, and I’d told the thread I’d “host this thing for years if I need to”, which I did.
The WATMM forum closed by decision, not by neglect. On 29 January 2025 Joyrex announced he was shutting it down; on 31 January he posted the rationale that ran as the thread’s “Featured Comment”:
Wow… thanks for everyone sharing their thoughts and feelings. While I appreciate your sentiments to carry on, I don’t think I conveyed well my intent in wanting to shut down WATMM. I don’t want the site to continue on, in any form, I know a lot of people get a lot of benefit from it, but I do not want it continuing and going in a direction I would not agree with had I continued to administer the site. Of course, I can’t stop anyone from doing their own thing, but for me personally, I think it’s time for We Are The Music Makers/WATMM to end. I would respectfully ask that whatever you want to do, please don’t associate it with WATMM/me or make any reference/connection to me. WATMM had it’s time, it’s place. Time to move on.
The original target was 3 June 2025; the site limped on into late April when the hosting funds ran out. The community migrated to keyosc.com, “We Care Because You Do”, branded away from WATMM at Joyrex’s request. Twenty-three years of posts were never likely to outlive Joyrex’s involvement; the wonder is that he carried it as long as he did.
The SoundCloud account is the strangest of the three. user18081971 is still alive in 2026, 57 tracks online, 182,000-odd followers, Richard himself logged in as recently as mid 2025. What changed in 2016 was the catalogue: the original 268-track dump was cleared off the timeline:
So at the time the takedown read as a transition rather than a stop.