
Myspace lost all the music its users uploaded between 2003 and 2015 - pmoriarty
https://boingboing.net/2019/03/17/facebook-is-next.html
======
mellow-lake-day
>Someday, this will happen to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc. Don't trust
the platforms to archive your data.

This also goes for Google Drive, Dropbox, and many other websites (if not all)

Examples:

[https://medium.com/@jancurn/how-bug-in-dropbox-
permanently-d...](https://medium.com/@jancurn/how-bug-in-dropbox-permanently-
deleted-my-8000-photos-cb7dcf13647b)

[https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgwnp/porn-on-
go...](https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/9kgwnp/porn-on-google-drive-
error)

[https://www.zdnet.com/article/dropbox-under-fire-for-dmca-
ta...](https://www.zdnet.com/article/dropbox-under-fire-for-dmca-takedown-of-
personal-folders-but-fears-are-vastly-overblown/)

~~~
zxcvbn4038
I used to work at Tumblr, the entirety of their user content is stored in a
single multi-petabyte AWS S3 bucket, in a single AWS account, no backup, no
MFA delete, no object versioning. It is all one fat finger away from oblivion.

~~~
kirillzubovsky
I’ve heard from Amazon friend that AWS as a whole is like that, one click away
from a total meltdown. Probably true.

~~~
stone-monkey
That's basically what happened with S3 a couple years back. Mistyped command
caused an outage for large parts of the internet in the US. Now, I dunno if
they could make a big enough mistake that would bring down the whole company,
but certainly it's been proven that a single mistake can affect major portions
of the internet.

~~~
antt
I always find it funny how I'm designing with best practices in mind on top of
infrastructure someone out of university build as their first project.

~~~
nostrebored
This is not the case with S3 and not the case with that incident.

~~~
lugg
Pretty sure there are first year grads who have worked on S3 as their first
project.

~~~
StavrosK
So what? You're saying it as if they gave them root access to the servers and
went "go nuts".

~~~
lugg
Bugs in code happen. You don't need write access to cause irreparable damage
when the app you're working on has it.

~~~
StavrosK
This applies to everyone, juniors and seniors, and that's why we have code
reviews, tests and tooling.

------
wishinghand
This reminded me of Purevolume.com, which I just went to go check. Seems like
it's a clickbait pop culture article site now. It used to be Soundcloud before
Soundcloud, though it was mostly popular with punk, hardcore, and their
various offshoots. All of that uploaded music...just gone.

It's not necessarily sites going out of business/losing data either. On
Bandcamp, Melora Creager used to have three songs up called The Willow Tree
Tryptych. I bought it but it's no longer available for download in my account,
though it's listed there. I'll have to pirate it somewhere since I don't seem
to have a download of it. I'll have to figure out that later since Spotify
atrophied my pirating knowledge.

Always archive your digital purchases when you can.

~~~
sedachv
mp3.com[1] predated Soundcloud by a decade, and was amazing both for listeners
and for independent artists. They were paying artists royalties per-
download/stream in 1999. The site shut down in 2003 and all the music was
lost.[2] I still have music I downloaded from mp3.com that I have not been
able to find anywhere else. This is why I still use and support P2P file
sharing. After the 2003 experience with mp3.com it was obvious to me that
using music streaming services was a bad idea.

[1]
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com#History](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MP3.com#History)

[2] There was some kind of deal with Trusonic/GarageBand.com where artists
were able to access their tracks uploaded to mp3.com and transfer them to
GarageBand.com for about a year from 2004 to 2005. It is unclear how many
people actually did the transfer (I had an mp3.com page for an electronic
music project and was never notified about this). GarageBand.com in turn
closed down in 2010, offering migration to iLike. iLike was acquired by
MySpace and rolled into MySpace Music in 2012.

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GarageBand.com](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/GarageBand.com)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILike](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ILike)

~~~
coroxout
I miss mp3.com and still have a few favourite mp3s by other people saved on a
hard disk somewhere (or so I thought - doesn't seem to be on this hard disk so
I'll have to check for them tonight).

I wish I'd archived the band bios too, because now they're completely out of
context, just some band names and song titles which aren't Googleable in
anyway. If any of the bios listed the musicians' names it'd be interesting to
see what they're up to now, 20 years later.

(Ouch, that really was 20 years ago.)

~~~
thomnottom
I've got probably a few thousand mp3s from there and other services (lots of
eMusic samplers) that now have little to no context. Sorting through them
lately, it's a tad depressing when I hear a really great song and can find
almost no information about the band that made it.

Also heavily used drip.fm. When Kickstarter decided to change the service to
Patreon-lite I asked about archiving the site because of all of the extra info
(forget about the music, I wanted the metadata). They told me they couldn't do
it.

------
crucialfelix
My best friend from high school contacted me on Myspace. He had uploaded all
his music, each band with a separate profile for posterity. Then he killed
himself. I found out on Facebook. We formed a group and mourned in Facebook.
Myspace died soon after that. Castles in the sand.

------
cozzyd
And a million people who can't remember their MySpace passwords to delete
their angsty teenager MySpace accounts jump with joy.

~~~
dredmorbius
Probably already reprieved:

 _In 2013, MySpace suddenly purged most of its users’ content, including
blogs, custom profiles, videos, and posts. There was no sunset, no death
announcement that would allow active users to round up their data. It was an
astonishing and quietly reported loss._

[https://thebaffler.com/salvos/404-page-not-found-
wagner](https://thebaffler.com/salvos/404-page-not-found-wagner)

------
buboard
I don't know why we don't have "digital safes" for our lives? People spend so
much time creating those streams of data and just leave them hanging wherever
on the internet. It is just not typical behavior of humans to leave all their
stuff on the streets. Current consumer-level storage devices aren't very safe
for very-long-term storage ; i wonder if anyone is working on some kind of
optical-based device or something else.

~~~
namibj
BD-R is only plagued by delamination, which is gradual and can be countered by
~yearly visual inspections looking for delamination combined with some
redundancy.

~~~
verytrivial
M-Disk is a somewhat pricey but apparently legit archival format that appeared
(from my point of view) just as the DVD/Blu-ray external writers market
collapsed.

I now have an external HDD in a portable fire-safe that I know could go from
100% working to 0% working at any moment. The thing I liked about optical is
you could have some hope of recovering most data as the media degraded, and
basically all with judicious use of ECC. It's a shame.

~~~
jstarfish
Those safes are prone to mold. Not a good place to store backup mechanical
equipment unless you compensate by opening it often and re/placing dessicant
packets.

------
Deimorz
This seems to just be blogspam that links to two different reddit threads, and
one's over a year old. The whole story appears to be based off a single
screenshot of an email from over 7 months ago [1], where you can't even see
the actual question they're responding to.

Is there a better source for this claim somewhere?

[1]:
[https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7uiv8b/myspace...](https://www.reddit.com/r/techsupport/comments/7uiv8b/myspace_player_wont_play_songs_and_i_want_to/e3bfy1f/)

~~~
AnotherGoodName
It's literally a banner on [https://myspace.com/](https://myspace.com/) right
now

"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. If you would like more
information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@myspace.com."

~~~
Deimorz
Weird, I don't see that banner. Here's a forum post that mentions it from over
7 months ago though, and it sounds like it might only appear for visitors from
certain locations:
[https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,114746.0.html](https://hydrogenaud.io/index.php/topic,114746.0.html)

Either way, the message in that banner makes it sound both more severe
(includes photos and videos too) and less certain. It's also strange that this
is suddenly getting attention today if that banner's been there for so long.

~~~
AnotherGoodName
Oh that's weird. I'm also getting the EU cookie acceptance banners as well.
I'm in Australia (definitely not in the EU). Perhaps they tied the data
deletion banner into the EU cookie acceptable banner?

You know I'm starting to think that MySpace isn't well run...

Screenshot of the banner i see for reference:
[https://imgur.com/GDrYqST](https://imgur.com/GDrYqST)

------
rchaud
I suspected that this had been the case for years now. A few years back, when
I heard Myspace had "relaunched" with a focus on music artists, I checked it
out, as in the 2000s MySpace was basically what Bandcamp is now for
independent artists; streaming music with options to buy tracks.

The artists' pages were completely blank, barring a few pictures and a
description extracted via the Wikipedia API. No music available at all. This
is was in stark contrast from the original MySpace days when the profile pages
would be chock full of streaming songs, tour announcements and interactions
with fans.

------
dman
Geocities, AngelFire, AudioGalaxy, Napster shutting down taught that to my
generation.

------
sandes
"Lost". I think storage servers are so expensive and they've decided remove
data

------
bitxbit
Just curious to see if there are any sort of government or private ‘Day 0’
instructions out there to help rebuild the world or to preserve human
knowledge in case of apocalypse?

~~~
namibj
Made it my lifegoal. Currently fighting minor issues of work/life balance to
gain income security to dedicate significant time to it. Currently looking for
dual-layer (if sufficiently cheap, also dual-side) BD-R sealed with desiccant
and buried in suitable bodies of water (temperature stability against
temperature-swing-induced fatigue of the data layers; yet retaining relative
ease of access). Predicted cost 15€/TB (incl. sales tax) @ low redundancy
(save against non-deliberate attacks via conventional weaponry), roughly
doubling for resilience against multiple isolated thermonuclear devices (even
in pathological locations w.r.t. the archive) or tripling (45€/TB) for a
current-arsenal worst-case WW3 not deliberately targeting the archive. All
assuming mass-migration after 50 years.

~~~
michaelgrafl
What are your thoughts on M-Discs?

------
actionowl
Thanks Tom!

------
seltzered_
If one has a few archived tracks from MySpace that are now lost, what’s the
appropriate way to share them? Contact the artist? Upload to YouTube? Or
archive.org?

~~~
Nemo_bis
archive.org is fine.

------
sytelus
Storage cost of hosting 1000 songs on web is about $1/yr. If these tracks are
not generating at least that much revenue then you are running operation at
lost. I would wonder if hosting these much data without having revenue streams
to support the cost would have been viable for long term anyway.

~~~
fao_
Doesn't mean they couldn't have archived it. Many places like archive.org or
archive team will host it for free.

------
shmerl
Which reminds me about Geocities MIDI collection set up by Internet Archive:

[https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersio...](https://archive.org/details/TheGeocitiesMidiCollectionVersion1.2)

------
gwern
Are there any estimates of what the total loss is? And what else is covered by
'some' when they say 'We completely rebuilt Myspace and decided to move over
some of your content from the old Myspace.'?

------
didgeoridoo
Why refer people to the DPO? Her role is to ensure GDPR compliance, not to
make sure data migrations go smoothly. Feels like a bit of buck-passing.

~~~
spydum
Agree - that job just got a bit easier (less data to protect)!

------
eurticket
Do people still use myspace?

~~~
r721
Alexa Global Rank 4,244

Alexa Rank in United States 2,079

[https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com](https://www.alexa.com/siteinfo/myspace.com)

SimilarWeb Global Rank 5,260

SimilarWeb Country Rank United States 1,644

Total Visits ~ 7.53M

[https://www.similarweb.com/website/myspace.com](https://www.similarweb.com/website/myspace.com)

~~~
isostatic
Many moons ago granny used to have 'alexa toolbar' junkware installed as one
of the many internet explorer toolbars.

I assume Alexa has moved on from such tracking methods?

~~~
r721
They apparently use extensions now:

"Alexa's traffic estimates are based on data from our global traffic panel,
which is a sample of millions of Internet users using one of many different
browser extensions. In addition, we gather much of our traffic data from
direct sources in the form of sites that have chosen to install the Alexa
script on their site and certify their metrics."

[https://www.alexa.com/about](https://www.alexa.com/about)

"Q: What is the “data panel”?

A: Alexa’s data panel is the sample of global internet traffic that is used to
calculate Alexa Ranks and estimate non-Certified metrics. The panel is
comprised of millions of internet users using one of over 25,000 different
browser extensions."

[https://blog.alexa.com/top-questions-about-alexa-
answered/](https://blog.alexa.com/top-questions-about-alexa-answered/)

SimilarWeb works similarly too (I actually like it a bit more):

"We leverage hundreds of sources which we categorize into 4 distinct groups:
1. Global Panel Data from hundreds of millions of desktop/mobile devices 2.
Global ISP Data from partners with millions of subscribers 3. Public Data
Sources from over a billion sites and app pages every month 4. Direct
Measurement Data from hundreds of thousands of sites and apps"

[https://www.similarweb.com/ourdata](https://www.similarweb.com/ourdata)

~~~
isostatic
That really doesn't feel representative

------
MagicPropmaker
Who is this "Dr. Jena Jentzsch"? Is she the person responsible for losing the
data, or is she just the contact for people now?

