MySpace loses 50 million songs in server migration AI-researched
Dependency: MySpace hosting platform
MySpace confirmed that a server migration corrupted all photos, videos, and audio uploaded between 2003–2015 — an estimated 50 million songs from 14 million artists, plus the earlier 2013 redesign that destroyed custom CSS profiles and user blogs.
Fixes & Mitigations
- Archive: The 'Myspace Dragon Hoard' — approximately 490,000 MP3s from 2008–2010 — was salvaged and uploaded to the Internet Archive. (link)
- No fix available: The vast majority of content is unrecoverable. MySpace claimed no backups existed.
In March 2019, MySpace confirmed that during a server migration project, all user-uploaded photos, videos, and audio files from 2003 to 2015 were corrupted and unable to be transferred. The company estimated roughly 50 million songs from 14 million artists were lost, with no recovery possible.
What changed
This was the second major destruction event for MySpace. The first came in 2013, when a complete site redesign silently deleted user blogs, private messages, custom CSS/HTML profiles, and embedded videos. MySpace profiles with custom CSS were a major early form of folk web art — users built elaborate visual identities using raw HTML and CSS, creating a massive, diverse ecosystem of personal expression that predated and influenced later “aesthetic web” movements.
The 2019 data loss destroyed what remained: the audio, photo, and video archives that had survived the redesign. Skeptics noted the “migration failure” may have been deliberate cost-cutting.
Notes
The “Myspace Dragon Hoard” — a partial archive of ~490,000 MP3s from 2008–2010 — was salvaged by an anonymous academic researcher and uploaded to the Internet Archive, preserving a tiny fraction of the lost material. The rest is gone permanently.