An Oral History of MySpace Music

Jason Tate Mar 30, 2020

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.

The MySpace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010)

Jason Tate Apr 4, 2019

Archive.org:

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. […] 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.

A bunch of music that was thought to be lost, has been found.

MySpace Says It Lost Years of User-Uploaded Music

Jason Tate Mar 18, 2019

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.”