Myspace lost an estimated 50 million songs, i.e. all the music uploaded through the site by 14m artists, between 2003 (when it launched) and 2015.
The files were lost during a server migration, says the Tom Anderson-founded social media platform, and are unrecoverable.
As reported by Rolling Stone, over the weekend a Reddit user posted that “all music on Myspace from 2015 and older stopped working” about a year ago and that Myspace “eventually admitted they lost all the data (and apparently didn’t have backups?)”.
After the songs stopped working on the platform’s music player around 12 months ago, Myspace was initially telling users that it was trying to fix the problem, but then admitted that the files were corrupted during a server migration.
The Reddit threads referred to here received wider public attention on Sunday (March 17 after technology reporter Andy Baio tweeted, “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”.
Added Baio: “I’m deeply skeptical this was an accident. Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than “we can’t be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s.”
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) 18 March 2019
An undated Myspace Help article, entitled, Where is all my old stuff?, says that Myspace “was completely rebuilt” and that it “decided to move over some of your content from the old Myspace”.
The only content listed here as having been transferred over from classic accounts to the rebuilt Myspace are friends and photos with a notice at the bottom of the page stating: “If you are looking for something that is not on this list, that means the content is no longer available and cannot be retrieved”.
According to this message from Myspace, shared by Boing Boing, all media files including photos, music and videos were lost during the server migration: “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. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your back up copies.”Music Business Worldwide
