Hundreds of thousands of "lost" MySpace songs have been recovered

Internet Archive has released a catalog of 490,000 MySpace songs downloaded on the service between 2008 and 2010 that had previously been considered lost as a result of a botched server migration. These songs represent less than one percent of estimated at 50 million tracks downloaded between 2003 and 2015 that the formerly dominant social network had been accidentally deleted.

The source of the saved tracks is an "anonymous academic group" that studied music networks while MySpace was still active. As part of their research, he downloaded 1.3 terabytes of music from the service. Later, when news of the loss of data was announced, she contacted Internet Archive and offered to send her the files.

The music is now available on an online interface designed in a charming way to resemble the original music player of MySpace. Searching and playing your music may be a little slow, but the Internet Archive said that the database finder, "Hobbit", is still being optimized and will eventually be open-source.

Internet Archive has provided many backups for music over the years. In 2017, when he feared the shutdown of SoundCloud after a series of layoffs, Internet Archive hosted a large backup copy of the service in case they were lost. In the same year, the organization also saved 50,000 vinyls received from the Great 78 project.

MySpace's current song database was only retrieved because an organization made a backup while it was still available, making it unlikely that the remaining 50 million pieces would be redone.