The Myspace Dragon Hoard

For years, I’ve pulled MP3s from the abandoned MySpace profiles of bands and musicians that I admire(d). Admittedly, it’s been an occasional habit. I’m as prone to forgetting that MySpace exists as the next person. Still, I’ve taken the time to dig out the odd platform-exclusive gem whenever that niggling thought crossed my mind.

Finding a rare track still hosted on an abandoned profile was a rush for long time after MySpace lost its relevance. At a certain point a few years back however, virtually every track I’ve attempted to play on Tom’s old site simply stopped responding to playback controls.

Turns out, MySpace mishandled a massive amount of data and lost all music uploaded over a twelve year period. Initially, the company insisted there was an error, writing the following in an email to a user looking to recover their songs:

There is an issue with all songs/videos uploaded over 3 years ago.

We are aware of the issue and I have been informed the issue will be fixed, however, there is no exact time frame for when this will be completed. Until this is resolved the option to download is not available. I apologize for the inconvenience this may be causing.

Later, they admitted that the data was entirely lost.

Due to a server migration files were corrupted and unable to be transferred over to our updated site. There is no way to recover the data.

One Redditor believes the data loss occurred around a year ago. Based on my experience, it happened at some point around the time the revamped version of the social network went live in 2013.

Regardless, more than 50 million tracks from 14 million artists were lost according to a report by The Guardian. It appeared that most of these remnants of the early streaming era were gone forever. That was until Jason Scott of textfiles.com partnered with an anonymous academic group to release a dump of 490,000 songs saved over the course of two years (2008-2010).

According to Scott, this 1.3TB cache was gathered by an anonymous academic group studying music networks. The collection, named The Myspace Dragon Hoard, now lives on The Internet Archive with a search tool that will allow you to peruse the collection without downloading—appropriately called Hobbit.

The dump represents a mere drop in the ocean of what was lost, but it’s more than we had yesterday. I look forward to digging through in the coming weeks to see what I can find.