Hundreds of thousands of lost MySpace MP3s have been recovered

You might remember the story from last month about how a botched server migration procedure resulted in MySpace losing 50 million tracks from 14 million artists. They termed this “an inconvenience.”

Given that MySpace used to be the place for music discovery, you can imagine the consternation of artists who had their stuff posted on the site.

Okay, maybe not. When the story broke, the most common reaction was “MySpace is still around?” Still, losing that much music when moving data is inexcusable.

The good news is that Archive.org has managed to recover a whack of songs from 2008-2010. I quote:

“A wide-ranging collection of 490,000 mp3 files from MySpace.com, accomplished using unknown means by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010. These files are arranged by the filenames assigned by MySpace’s Content Delivery Network, the key of which is in the metadata.tsv file in this collection. MD5 and SHA hashes are also provided from the original project, and included in the main directory.

“Nearly every file in this item is no longer hosted at MySpace, due to a suspicious and low-key deletion/loss of data in 2018.

“There is no other information about the origin of this collection at this time.”

This amounts to 1.3 TB of material. Go here if you’ve got that kind of storage space. Thanks to Andy for the tip.