Who knew that Myspace was still a thing? Not me. I deleted my account there a long time ago and never looked back. It turns out that there are people who still use Myspace, and who are probably very upset today. Myspace has somehow lost all content that was uploaded to its site before 2016.
According to The Guardian, MySpace is blaming the mass deletion on a faulty server migration (which happened more than a year ago). MySpace has confirmed that music that had been uploaded to the site has been lost permanently.
More than 50m tracks from 14 million artists have been lost, including songs that led to the rise of the “Myspace Generation” cohort of artists, such as Lily Allen, Arctic Monkeys and Yeasayer. As well as music, the site has also accidentally deleted pictures and videos stored on its servers.
Cory Doctorow, on boingboing, pointed out something we can all learn from this mass deletion of content. He wrote: “Someday, this will happen to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. Don’t trust the platforms to archive your data.” He recommends the Internet Archive as a good place to archive things.
It appears that the things you uploaded to Myspace are gone forever. This could happen with whatever other social media sites you are using. It might be a good time to make sure you have copies of the photos, videos, music, writing and artwork you posted on social media. Do it before it all mysteriously disappears.