Internet Archive publishes half a million lost MySpace songs

Spread the love

Internet Archive has posted nearly half a million songs online that have been on MySpace between 2008 and 2010. The data comes from an anonymous group of researchers. In mid-March, it was publicly announced that MySpace had lost some of its pre-2016 data.

Internet Archive calls it The Myspace Dragon Hoard and has published the collection of 1.3TB of MP3 files and metadata on a special page. It also includes a media player to search for and play songs from the collection. Because a 1.3TB file is “unmanageable” according to the archive, the organization has divided the files into 144 zip files.

It is not entirely clear where the 450,000 songs come from. Internet Archive employee Jason Scott writes on Twitter that they were collected by an ‘anonymous group of researchers’. Their research was about music networks, for that they had downloaded the songs. “Someone” asked Scott if he wanted the files. A published screenshot suggests that the data has not been supplied to the archive site by the researchers themselves. Scott goes on to say that people who still have downloaded MySpace songs themselves can contact him.

Finally, the employee writes that Internet Archive optimizes the media player and will eventually release it under an open source license. The Internet Archive calls the player the Hobbit and says it’s based on MySpace’s old music player in appearance.

Last March it was announced that MySpace had lost songs from 2016 and before. It is unclear how much music was lost. The official response from the social network is that the files got corrupted during a server migration and it is not possible to recover the lost data. According to Scott it is ‘clear’ that parent company Meredith will never update the old data moved to the new server.

You might also like