Were you in a band with a Myspace page between 2003 and 2015? If you were, then any music you uploaded to the social media network is now gone. In an email sent to Redditor u/austinjckson, the company’s data privacy officer confirmed that “due to a server migration files were corrupted and unable to be transferred over to our updated site” (via BoingBoing).
News that the files may have been lost first surfaced a year ago when the company said that it was experiencing an issue with any songs or videos that were updated over three years ago. At the time, Myspace said that the issue would be fixed, although it was unable to say when. Unfortunately, it now seems that this fix wasn’t possible and “there is no way to recover the lost data.”
Although music is likely to be the biggest loss, a statement posted by the company has confirmed that any photos and videos uploaded during the affected time frame have also been lost.
Myspace was the biggest social media network of the early 2000s, and it helped launch the careers of many artists that are still around today, from Arctic Monkeys to Enter Shikari. (My own pop-punk emo band wasn’t quite as successful, despite my best efforts to straighten my hair and dye it black.) However, it’s languished in obscurity since around 2008 when then-upstart Facebook overtook it in web traffic.
It’s hard to believe that anyone may have been relying on Myspace as their sole backup for any music, but if you’ve forgotten to make a backup until now, then you’ve unfortunately missed your last opportunity. Take this as a warning that nothing on the internet can be relied on to last forever, and use this time as a reminder to back up any precious mixtapes that you’re hoarding anywhere else on the web.
