Bad news, former scene kids: MySpace lost 12 years of music
Before Facebook, there was MySpace. If you were a teen during the early aughts, you probably agonized over what theme to use on your profile, who would be in your Top 8, and which songs to feature on your page. MySpace, if you can believe it, was one of the best and easiest ways to share and discover new music. But if you uploaded any audio files to MySpace back in the day, you might not be able to recover them.
On March 18th, MySpace confirmed that during a server migration, they lost all music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015, BBC News reports. But it’s not just music. Photos and videos from the same time period could be lost as well.
How did MySpace lose so much music?
"As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from MySpace," the company told BBC News in a statement. "We apologize for the inconvenience."
Kickstart co-creator Andy Baio estimates that as many as 50 million songs from 14 million artists may no longer exist. So unless you have them backed up elsewhere, there might be no remaining trace of your high school cover band on the internet.
Myspace accidentally lost all the music uploaded from its first 12 years in a server migration, losing over 50 million songs from 14 million artists. https://t.co/OyKB5Dxtw9
— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) March 18, 2019
As CNN notes, many artists—including Kate Nash, Calvin Harris, and Arctic Monkeys—were discovered on MySpace.
Those who shared original music to the platform could find that all their work has been erased. According to Vox, complaints about being unable to listen to music files on MySpace go back at least as far as 2018, when one Reddit user complained they couldn’t access audio files from 2007 to 2011.
https://twitter.com/udfredirect/status/1107349915854954498
On one hand, it’s probably for the best that some of our cringiest pictures are gone. But on the other, we’re mourning the loss of so much music. One thing’s for sure, though: This is definitely making us rethink the way we store our data. Sometimes the internet really isn’t forever.
