MySpace Lost All Your Music

The year was 2003 and it was starting to feel like the wild wild west on the internet. Napster in it’s original form was dead but music was still strong as ever. Then came MySpace it was the absolutely the hottest site on the internet. It was really the first massive social media platform and it provided a spot for bands. Mine included. But as they say all good things must come to an end. And in many ways that included music with real instruments. And also…. Facebook.

The decline of rock music and the explosion of the new social media platform Facebook was the One-Two punch that killed the once king of social media. People abandoned the site at an amazing rate. But what was left behind was a time capsule of the music of that era. And not just from nobody’s like me. A lot of big name bands used the platform to promote their new releases or even demos of their material. But more than anything this was huge for the indie artists.

The site went through several changes and owners over the years. Including what was to be a revival by Justin Timberlake in 2013 but nothing could breathe fresh air into this dead site. And huge dead site, like the Internets version of a dead bloated whale on a beach just waiting for dynamite.

As the site saw many changes functionality started to decrease. For years users have reported issues using the sites player. When staff from MySpace finally acknowledged the issue they offered no timetable for resolution. But evidence trickled out seemed to insinuate that the problems were attributed to a not so smooth server migration sometime around 2015.

Then according to reddit, in Summer 2018, MySpace admitted on their site that all music files have been lost and no backups were available.

“If you don’t see any photos, that means your old account was not synced to your new Myspace. Try doing a search to see if you can locate your old Myspace account. Unfortunately, if you cannot locate your old profile we will be unable to assist with retrieval since the old Myspace was never transferred to the new Myspace.”

Now it’s being reported that MySpace’s Data Privacy Officer stated,
 “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 lost data.”

So why am I talking about this? Simple, despite MySpace being a shell of it’s former self the site still tracked about 50.6 million monthly visitors in 2015 and had nearly one billion registered users. That’s big, really big. Too big to not have a disaster recovery plan in place.

This is what I do for a living. Not MySpace but I am an I.T. Manager. This stuff is not hard so naturally I have a few questions. I go through constant server migrations for different things. I have some coming up as a matter of fact. I’m not migrating on the level that MySpace is as i’m sure with all the change of ownership there was probably some migrations to different hardware or cloud providers that took place. But to not have any emergency provisions in place amazes me. No matter what I do I have an escape plan. If they truly did have an issue during migration they should have had the old servers available, simple testing would have shown they had an issue. And if nothing else letting the new hosts run for a couple of weeks with the old hosts simply shut down but available would have allowed them time to collect emails from users pointing out problems.

But enough of me yammering. The reality is, I had no idea it was broken cuz…. I never use MySpace anyway…. But use this as a warning, always back up your stuff. And off site at that.