Ground Control to Myspace Tom

Caitlin Dewey:

In fairness, no one really knows if Anderson would navigate our current social media environment with more or less grace than the current bozos.1 He left the game in 2009, when social media was still widely and unreservedly viewed as a force for social good. His scandals were of the comical and momentary sort; his politics — if he has them — have always seemed wan and vague. 

But the fact that Anderson did retire from tech, and at the tender age of 38, testifies to a political philosophy and a set of values that feel almost radical today. People like Musk and Zuckerberg are hell-bent on amassing unprecedented, indecent stores of power and wealth. Anderson isn’t exactly curing cancer, by comparison … but he’s at least bucked the gospel of infinite extraction.

H/T: Nick Heer

An Oral History of MySpace Music

Stereogum

Stereogum released an oral history of MySpace Music.

As a new decade begins, it seems worthwhile to look back at the website that defined not just the previous era, but the way we continue to consume and discuss music online, in order to contemplate both how we got to our present moment and what we have lost along the way. In Stereogum’s oral history of Myspace Music, twenty artists and former Myspace executives discuss their experience both using and working on the site, living through the bubble years, and why it couldn’t last forever.

MySpace Says It Lost Years of User-Uploaded Music

Shannon Van Sant, writing at NPR:

MySpace — the once-dominant social media platform that was largely subsumed by Facebook — may have lost a decade’s worth of music uploaded by users, the company says. […] According to several media reports, it posted a message on its site recently reading, “As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from MySpace. We apologize for the inconvenience.”