Nearly half a million tracks, which were thought to be lost in a botched Myspace server migration, have been rescued.
Last month, Myspace revealed that it had lost all music uploaded to the site between 2003 and 2015. An email from Myspace’s Data Privacy Officer at the time confirmed that there was “no way to recover the lost data.” Now, 490,000 mp3 files have been re-uploaded to the web, thanks to an “anonymous academic group” who had downloaded 1.3 terabytes of music from Myspace when it was the dominant social media network.
After hearing about the loss, the group contacted The Internet Archive and sent over the collection. The online archive, titled “The Myspace Music Dragon Hoard”, has now been released. A custom search and play function, called the ‘Hobbit’, can be used to explore the collection. Currently, the function is still being edited and optimised.
ANNOUNCING THE MYSPACE MUSIC DRAGON HOARD, a 450,000 song collection of mp3s from 2008-2010 on MySpace, gathered before they were all “deleted” by mistake. https://t.co/oIunuHF7wc includes a link to a special custom search and play mechanism that lets you search and play songs. pic.twitter.com/aGkFPDBN7r
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) April 4, 2019
Myspace was the dominant social media platform in the 2000s, and in 2006 Jupiter Research published a report stating that the site had generated the most community-related musical activity online.
Read the Crack Magazine feature: Myspace’s server error reveals the danger that lies in entrusting tech companies with our cultural histories.
