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MySpace lost 12 years of music and photos, leaving a sizable gap in social network history

It's 2019 and MySpace is newsworthy again. Unfortunately, it’s for the worst of reasons: massive data loss.

On Sunday, news spread concerning a longtime data issue plaguing MySpace, a site that was once the internet’s leading social network. Millions of songs, photos, and videos that were uploaded to the site before 2015 were lost during a data migration, according to MySpace, with no chance of recovery.

"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," read a since-removed announcement on the website. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

Users who still visit MySpace had been complaining since at least February 2018 about the inability to play certain songs on the website’s music player. At the time, however, users claimed that MySpace’s support had told them the issue “was being fixed.” The social network was quiet on the issue until recently confirming the irreversible data loss to Jason Scott of the Internet Archive. 

MySpace now may be the butt of all social media jokes, but there was a time before Facebook, from 2005 to 2008, where it was the de facto social media website. In fact, MySpace was once the number one website in the entire country.

According to MySpace’s stats, the site at one time hosted 53 million songs spanning across 14.2 million artists. It had hundreds of millions of users, including artists and others.

While some won’t mind the deletion of millions of emo songs and mirror-shots from some of the internet’s earliest influencers, it certainly is a huge loss. Years of audio and visuals detailing how people lived and interacted online have vanished. The internet is an integral piece of modern history and MySpace was a major part of that. There’s a reason archivists preserve internet content.

SEE ALSO: The death of YouTube annotations marks an end for early interactive web video

On that Reddit post from last year, users lamented the possible loss of their early lives. If a user grew up during the Facebook-era, those photos from a decade ago are still a click away. If a user was a teenager during the MySpace-era, those old pics from their youth are likely gone. There’s an especially sad comment from a father who wanted to retrieve his deceased son’s guitar recordings, which were once available to listen to on MySpace. Those audio files are gone now.

The early days of social networking had not yet instilled the idea that all the content we put online could one day just disappear. The cloud was new. People could pull up their band demo on any computer and play it anywhere! How could this technology that put all of our data everywhere one day result in our data being nowhere?

This isn’t the first time a piece of the early internet has been lost thanks to MySpace. In 2011, News Corp. sold MySpace to a media group that included Justin Timberlake as a stakeholder. The site relaunched in 2013 in an attempt to rebrand, leaning even more heavily into its music offerings. Without warning, MySpace permanently wiped out a decade’s worth of users’ blog posts, comments, and private messages. Nearly six years later and under completely new ownership, it looks like MySpace scrubbed most of the content it had left.

Facebook, Twitter, and most other popular social media platforms now give users much more control over exporting their data. When social networks do go bust, many tech companies now provide at least some notice so that its users can save their content.

Let MySpace in 2019 be the lesson: back up your personal files, because the internet is still proving to be quite ephemeral.