The Internet Archive has uploaded 450,000 songs collected before Myspace’s massive data loss

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  • April 4, 2019

Last month, it became widely known that MySpace has lost much of the user data uploaded to it before 2016, including potentially million of music tracks from between 2003 to 2015. This is a significant loss for people who may not have used the site anymore, but took for granted that it would remain an online scrapbook of the years when Myspace was the go-to social network, including for musicians promoting their work. A new collection of MP3s hosted by the Internet Archive, however, may help some users recover lost music (and memories).

Called the MySpace Music Dragon Hoard, the collection contains 450,000 songs. While this is just a small percentage of the tracks reportedly lost (according to estimates, up to 53 million songs from 14 million artists were deleted), it contains early work from now-famous artists including Donald Glover and Katy Perry, as Twitter user @pinkpushpop discovered.

Jason Scott of the Internet Archive said on Twitter that 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.” After learning about the data loss, they offered the collection to Scott.

While it appears that the tracks were lost during a data migration, MySpace has remained tight-lipped about the situation, leading to speculation that the loss may not have been accidental.

Source : The Internet Archive has uploaded 450,000 songs collected before Myspace’s massive data loss