MySpace has lost every piece of music uploaded between 2003 and 2015
In the early 2000s, MySpace transformed the careers of wannabe musicians, helping to launch the likes of Lily Allen, Kate Nash and the Arctic Monkeys to global stardom. Now, it appears, all that music has been lost forever.
Around a year ago, people began to notice that the MySpace music player had stopped working for songs uploaded up until 2015. At the time, MySpace advised users that it was working on a fix to resolve the issue, but now the company has admitted that there’s no hope and the music is lost forever.
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“Due to a server migration files were corrupted and unable to be transferred over to our updated site,” an email response from MySpace reads. “There is no way to recover the lost data.” That’s over 50 million songs from 14 million artists lost forever.
The former CTO of Kickstarter, Andy Baio, shared an interesting perspective on this, tweeting: “I’m deeply sceptical 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.’”
Related: How to back up and organise your Google Photos
Whether you buy this or not, it’s a timely reminder that cloud services are not permanent, and if you have something with real value (sentimental or monetary), then it’s on you to keep your own backup. So yes, use Dropbox, Google Drive, YouTube and anything else, but if it really matters to you then ensure you have a local backup as well.
Because yes, it may seem impossible to imagine a time when Facebook and Google don’t exist right now. But it wasn’t so long ago that Yahoo and MySpace looked similarly unstoppable, too.
Did you lose anything from MySpace’s data migration? Let us know on Twitter: @TrustedReviews.
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Editorial independence
Editorial independence means being able to give an unbiased verdict about a product or company, with the avoidance of conflicts of interest. To ensure this is possible, every member of the editorial staff follows a clear code of conduct.
Professional conduct
We also expect our journalists to follow clear ethical standards in their work. Our staff members must strive for honesty and accuracy in everything they do. We follow the IPSO Editors’ code of practice to underpin these standards.