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Myspace, the once-powerful social network, has lost every piece of content downloaded on its site before 2016, including millions of songs, photos and videos without any other home on the Internet.
The company attributes mbadive deletion to an erroneous server migration, which seems to have occurred more than a year ago when early reports of users unable to access older content appeared. The company confirmed to online archivists that the music was definitely lost, raising the hope that a backup could be used to permanently protect the collection for future generations.
More than 50 million pieces of artists belonging to 14 million artists have been lost, including songs that have led to the rise of the cohort of artists from the "Myspace Generation" , such as Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys and Yeasayer. In addition to music, the site also accidentally deleted images and videos stored on its servers.
Even though many users had abandoned MySpace in the late 2000s to access new social networks such as Facebook, the site kept a significant user base until the end of this decade because musicians had cultivated the follow-up. A disastrous recovery in 2013 forced most groups to rebuild their communities from scratch.
This relaunch also removed much of the textual content of the site, including "wall messages" between users. But music and images have been left out, hoping to be the building blocks of a second life centered on music that will never happen.
Despite this, the site still has some intrepid users, such as Kenneth Scalir, who told the Guardian in 2018: "Myspace is such an important part of my life. I met new people that I would not have known otherwise and did not hear about new fashions and groups.
Some have wondered how the troubled company, bought by Time Inc in 2016, could make such a mistake. "I am deeply skeptical that this is an accident", wrote the web expert Andy Baio. "Blatant incompetence is perhaps a public relations problem, but it always sounds better than:" We can not be bothered by the efforts and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million MP3s. "
Myspace had initially claimed that the deletion was a temporary mistake, as the customer support staff then told a user, "I have been informed that the problem would be solved." But last July, the company publicly acknowledged that no solution of this type was proposed.
A banner at the top of the site now tells visitors: "Following a server migration project, photos, videos, and audio files that you downloaded more than three years ago may not be available anymore. on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you keep your backups. If you would like more information, please contact our data protection officer. "
The news of the removal of Myspace has prompted comparisons with other old Internet communities that have closed, removing huge swaths of online history, from the website maker Geocities to the failing social network Google More. But these sites have managed to warn archivists enough to capture the heart of their communities for posterity. In 2016, Internet Archive launched a searchable collection of every GIF ever posted on Geocities, after mirroring the entire network in 2009, shortly before it closed.
This weekend, Internet Archive announced that it was working on the preservation of publications in Google Plus before closing the site in April. The archive estimates that it costs around $ 2 to permanently archive 1 gigabyte of data.
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