Just this morning, it was revealed that Myspace, a site whose golden age was from 2005 to 2008, and the mere mention of which conjures wearing low rise jeans and thoughtfully rearranging your top 8, has lost over 50 million songs uploaded over a 12 year period. Music that was uploaded to the social networking site from 2003 to 2015, which includes work from over 14 million artists, has disappeared after a server migration by the website.
Myspace notably launched the careers of many musicians, like Adele, The Weeknd, The Arctic Monkeys, and Kate Nash. However, it may not only be musical content that has been lost in the mass deletion. According to the Guardian, this also includes “every single piece of content uploaded to its site before 2016, including millions of songs, photos and videos with no other home on the internet.”
“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 said, according to the BBC. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
However, some are questioning whether or not this was actually an accident. Andy Baio, who helped build the site Kickstarter, tweeted, “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.” Maybe Myspace Tom knows?