Myspace
| MySpace | |
 Welcome to the neighborhood | |
| URL | https://myspace.com |
| Status | Endangered |
| Archiving status | Many past iterations Lost, current version Not saved yet |
| Archiving type | Unknown |
| Project source | None |
| Project tracker | None |
| IRC channel | #archiveteam-bs (on hackint) |
- I dont even care if they stay on Myspace...i just want to save them to my computer...which i never thought to do before because...well...why would you??
Myspace is a music discovery service and former social networking website, with a penchant for deleting all of your shit with no warning.
Datapocalypse #1: Deleting all the fans
MySpace Squandered the Only Thing It Had Left:
- When MySpace launched its Justin Timberlake-heavy redesign, there was a critical aspect missing from every artist page. An asset that bands, record labels, and interns spent countless hours building: their fan base. MySpace decided that they would erase the audience that the bands had built and ask them to start over.
- To put it simply, THEY DELETED THE F*CKING FANS.
- [...]
- I know that the data from the old system isn’t optimal. I know that most of us have moved on and there’s very little chance we’d actually engage with MySpace again. But the fact that MySpace didn’t automatically port our accounts and the friend graph over from its old system is lost on me. I don’t get it. IT’S ONE OF THE LAST ASSETS THEY HAD.
Datapocalypse #2: Deleting all your shit
As reported (once again) by TechCrunch on June 12th 2013, MySpace rewarded its remaining users by deleting all of the shit they cared about. So for folks of a certain age, that's more-or-less half a decade up to 2007 dumped down the cultural memory hole:
- What will not be available from my old profile?
- We're focused on building the best Myspace possible. And to us, that means helping you discover connect and share with others using the best tools available. Going forward we're concentrating on building and maintaining the features that make those experience better. That means you won't see a few products on the new site...
- Blogs
- Private Messages
- Videos
- Comments or Posts
- Custom background design
- Games
Datapocalypse #3: Accidentally deleting 12 years of music
In late 2017, users started reporting that music tracks do not play. Initially, the Myspace developers tried to conceal the problem and claimed to be trying to repair it, probably to delay the ultimate embarrassment, but eventually admitted that the data was lost.[1][2]
Or, as it has been estimated, Myspace accidentally lost all the music uploaded from its first 12 years in a server migration, losing over 50 million songs from 14 million artists.
Given the history of MySpace, there is a chance that the deletion was a deliberate measure to reduce costs, but there is no way to know for sure.[3]
How do I get my shit back? Did Archive Team save it?
- We thought it would be there, or that they would give some warning and a way to retrieve data if they suddenly decided to gut everything. I just lost what amounts to 7 years of a diary, travel stories, reflections, memories of my (now dead) father, 7 years of my 20s just vanished, gone.. It's not upsetting, it's devastating. I'm grief stricken... silly me, thinking my content was mine.It's not even like a hard drive crash, a hard drive can be easily backed up but blogs were notoriously hard to, maybe purposely hard to. And now..all gone.
Archive Team was unable to rescue any Myspace blogs or videos. Even we cannot do anything about vast deletions of material at no notice. We're sorry.
Jim Youngkin has some hints for recovering your stuff. This uses Google's cache, so if you're reading this long after June 2013, it probably won't work, and if your blogs were friends-only it definitely won't work.
Lessons
- Fuck Myspace. Myspace's management have made it very clear that they will purge your stuff with no warning. Not that there is much left on there which wasn't deleted in the various purges, but if you do have anything that you value on there, get it out immediately.
- This is Facebook in a few years' time. Don't treat any of today's popular services as a permanent archive. If Facebook thought that it could make more money out of you by throwing you in a garden shredder and turning you into fertiliser it would do so in half a heartbeat. They do not care about you or your stuff. Please keep local copies of your shit.
References
- ↑ MySpace music profiles - /r/music, 2017-12-09
- ↑ Myspace apparently lost 12 years’ worth of music, and almost no one noticed - Ars Technica, 2019-03-18, "In February 2018, a Myspace support rep told a user […]“We are aware of the issue and I have been informed the issue will be fixed”"
- ↑ Tweet by @waxpancake on 2019-03-17: I'm deeply skeptical this was an accident. Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than "we can't be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s."