Last year, links to media files on one-time social media giant MySpace stopped working. An advisory note at the top of the site's login page confirms that due to a server migration, photos, videos and audio files uploaded prior to 2015 might no longer be available. Now almost 500,000 previously lost music files have been recovered and made freely available via the Internet Archive digital library.
In the early-to-mid noughties, just about everyone who was anyone had a MySpace profile, and if you were a recording artist looking to connect with your fans, chances are you uploaded some music to the portal. The loss of photos, video and music from 2003 – when MySpace began – to up to 2015 is a huge one, even if MySpace isn't quite the social media behemoth it used to be.
But thanks to an anonymous academic study that ran between 2008 and 2010, some MP3 files have been recovered. That collection, dubbed the Dragon Hoard, is made up of 490,000 music files, and is now being hosted on the Internet Archive – all 1.3 terabytes of it, split into 144 ZIP files. Almost all of the files in the Hoard are no longer available on MySpace.
The recovery of just under half a million music audio files may be a drop in the ocean compared to the total files lost – which Rolling Stone reports could be in the region of 50 million songs from 14 million artists – but it's something, right?
The Internet Archive began in 1996, tasking itself with backing up the whole internet. As the internet grew, so did the Archive and it now contains 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and texts, 4.5 trillion audio recording, 4 million videos, 3 million images and 200,000 software programs.
The MySpace Dragon Hoard can be accessed via the source link below.
Source: The Internet Archive