Last month, it was reported that over 50 million songs had been lost when Myspace — the formerly en vogue social networking site that has fallen into relative cultural irrelevancy — announced that nearly all the music that had been uploaded to the site prior to 2015 had been mysteriously deleted. The news came as a great shock to many, not simply because it was yet another example of how insecure the mounds of digital data we voluntarily fork over to social media companies are, but also because it meant that an entire era of music had basically been wiped away in an instant. For years, Myspace was the premiere venue for music discovery and a hub for both established and unknown artists to share their work. With last month’s announcement, it appeared as if a digital history had been lost. Now, it appears there might yet be some hope.
ANNOUNCING THE MYSPACE MUSIC DRAGON HOARD, a 450,000 song collection of mp3s from 2008-2010 on MySpace, gathered before they were all "deleted" by mistake. https://t.co/oIunuHF7wc includes a link to a special custom search and play mechanism that lets you search and play songs. pic.twitter.com/aGkFPDBN7r
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) April 4, 2019
On Wednesday, digital historian, archivist, and filmmaker Jason Scott tweeted a link to a new project he called, “THE MYSPACE MUSIC DRAGON HOARD.” According to Scott, the project would allow users to search through “a 450,000 song collection of mp3s from 2008-2010 on MySpace, gathered before they were all ‘deleted’ by mistake.” According to the description on the archive’s site, the collection of songs had been compiled “using unknown means by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010.”
https://twitter.com/pinkpushpop/status/1113625305984524288
Among the 450,000-plus songs are some apparent gems, including old work by Katy Perry, Nicki Minaj, Rza, Pitbull, 2 Chainz, and Donald Glover when he was still going by the pseudonym “McDJ.”
You can check out the archive for yourself here.
