If You Have Old Music, Pics, Videos On MySpace, They're Gone
SAN FRANCISCO (CBS SF) - Fifty million MP3s and countless more photos and videos uploaded and stored on MySpace by users are gone... forever.
The mostly abandoned social media website has "migrated its servers" and any data stored more than 3 years ago, was lost.
Since the company's inception, some 14 million artists have uploaded 53 million songs, according to Arstechnica.
"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," said the company, when a Reddit user first noticed their MySpace player wasn't playing or allowing downloads last year. "We apologize for the inconvenience."
That said, given the virtual non-use of the social media forum, some former users may be hard-pressed to recall what content they have, or rather had, on MySpace. But sadly, the cultural loss is real to the thousands and thousands of musicians and artists who used it.
"A lot of musicians used MySpace to launch their music back in the day," says Bay Area music writer Dave Pehling. "Arctic Monkeys and Panic! At The Disco are just two major bands that broke on MySpace."
The loss covers all media back to the MySpace's inception in 2003.
Reddit users have been talking about the loss for more than a year. On Sunday, a user finally wrote, "I realize MySpace isn't a hot topic anymore, but I've never seen it posted anywhere so I'm posting it here," setting off a thread of comments, shares, and media coverage.
The post continues, "About a year ago, all music on MySpace from 2015 and older stopped working. At first MySpace said they were working on the issue, but they eventually admitted they lost all the data (and apparently didn't have backups?)... So, if anyone has any old music they think they have safely backed up to MySpace, make sure to back it up somewhere else or risk losing it forever. If your only copy was on MySpace... sorry :\."
Meridith/Viant Technology currently owns MySpace.
The company was founded in 2003 by Chris DeWolfe and Tom Anderson. In 2008, the Los Angeles-based company threw a sandbox-themed launch event for the opening of its San Francisco office. Draconian layoffs would follow within a couple of years.
Singer Justin Timberlake teamed up with Specific Media Group and bought the company in 2011 for $35 million, in hopes of a celebrity-driven renaissance that never happened.
There are still people who use MySpace, but most users migrated to other social media sites, though, like Facebook, Instagram and SnapChat.
At the peak of its meteoric rise to becoming the most popular social media forum teens and young adults, media titan Rupert Merdoch's News Corporation paid $580 million for MySpace, and within a few years, the company reportedly tripled in value.
