Last month, Myspace confirmed it had accidentally deleted 12 years worth of users’ music, along with photos, videos, and other audio files. Now, it seems the Internet Archive may be able to help some people recover what they’ve lost.
The Internet Archive is a non-profit library of books, movies, software, music, and more. On Wednesday, The Internet Archive’s Jason Scott announced the Myspace Music Dragon Hoard. According to Scott, the collection contains 450,000 songs from 2008-2010 on Myspace, “gathered before they were all ‘deleted’ by mistake.”
Myspace reported it had lost data uploaded between 2003 and 2015, but the Myspace Music Dragon Hoard doesn’t expand to all of those years. Still, for those who used Myspace as a window into early music by their favorite artists, it’s good news.
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
Scott said the set was compiled by “an anonymous academic group who were studying music networks and grabbed 1.3 terabytes of mp3s to study from MySpace in roughly 2008-2010 to do so.”
The set contains early clips from artists like Donald Glover, Nicki Minaj, and more, according to one user. That shows just how impactful Myspace’s loss was. A lot of important and culturally relevant tracks were stored on the website.
Thanks to the Internet Archive, at least some of those who were impacted can search for their music memories.