Skip to main content

Hundreds of thousands of ‘lost’ MySpace songs have been recovered

Hundreds of thousands of ‘lost’ MySpace songs have been recovered

/

But it’s less than one percent of the total songs accidentally deleted

Share this story

tom-anderson-myspace

The Internet Archive has published a catalogue of 490,000 MySpace songs uploaded to the service between 2008 and 2010 that were previously thought lost as a result of a botched server migration. These songs are less than one percent of the estimated 50 million tracks uploaded between 2003 and 2015 that the once dominant social network accidentally deleted.

The source of the saved tracks is an “anonymous academic group” that was studying music networks while MySpace was still active. As part of their research, it downloaded 1.3 terabytes of music from the service. Later, when the news of the data loss emerged, it contacted the Internet Archive and offered to send it the files.

The music is now available to play through an online interface which has been charmingly designed to look like MySpace’s original music player. It can be a little slow to search through and start playing your music, but the Internet Archive has said that the database’s searcher, “Hobbit,” is still being optimized and will eventually be open-sourced.

The Internet Archive has provided numerous backups for music over the years. Back in 2017, amid fears that SoundCloud could shut down following a massive round of layoffs, the Internet Archive hosted a large backup of songs from the service in case they were lost. That same year, the organization also backed up 50,000 records received from the Great 78 Project.

The current MySpace song database has only been recovered because an organization made a backup when it was still available, making it unlikely the rest of the 50 million tracks will ever resurface.