Music News: Myspace loses 50 million songs, oops
by Jay Gabler
March 18, 2019
Lily Allen, one of many music acts whose careers were boosted by Myspace, performs in England during the network's 2006 peak. (Jim Dyson/Getty Images)
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Myspace loses 50 million songs, oops
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The social network Myspace has 'fessed up to losing some of its users' data. Let me be a little more specific: Myspace accidentally lost 50 million songs uploaded between 2003 and 2015. Hope you had a backup.
If you didn't noticed that five million albums' worth of music disappeared from Myspace, you're not alone. The fact only surfaced publicly after Reddit users noticed last year that the Myspace music player had disappeared. One of those users e-mailed Myspace and was informed that the songs were lost due to an accidental data corruption during a server migration. The company understandably decided not to, say, issue a press release about the accident, but they've now confirmed the deletion in a public statement.
While it's impossible to know how many artists and fans were seriously affected by the Myspace incident, it served as a reminder that just because your music's in the cloud, that doesn't mean it's safe forever.
It also made a lot of fans nostalgic for the days when Myspace was a major site for music discovery. Because users were encouraged to soundtrack their profiles, Myspace became a launching pad for artists ranging from Lily Allen to Arctic Monkeys to Kate Nash. The platform peaked in 2006, when it surpassed Google as America's most-visited website. A couple of years later it was overtaken worldwide by Facebook, which has never made music central to its user experience. (Stereogum)
https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2019/03/18/myspace-loses-50-million-songs
by Jay Gabler
March 18, 2019
Lily Allen, one of many music acts whose careers were boosted by Myspace, performs in England during the network's 2006 peak. (Jim Dyson/Getty Images)
Play/Pause
LISTEN:
Myspace loses 50 million songs, oops
0:00 | 00:11:35
Above, listen to an episode of The Current's daily Music News podcast. Subscribe on Apple Podcasts, Google Play, Spotify, or wherever else you get your podcasts. You can also sign up for a daily Music News e-mail and join our Facebook group.
The social network Myspace has 'fessed up to losing some of its users' data. Let me be a little more specific: Myspace accidentally lost 50 million songs uploaded between 2003 and 2015. Hope you had a backup.
If you didn't noticed that five million albums' worth of music disappeared from Myspace, you're not alone. The fact only surfaced publicly after Reddit users noticed last year that the Myspace music player had disappeared. One of those users e-mailed Myspace and was informed that the songs were lost due to an accidental data corruption during a server migration. The company understandably decided not to, say, issue a press release about the accident, but they've now confirmed the deletion in a public statement.
While it's impossible to know how many artists and fans were seriously affected by the Myspace incident, it served as a reminder that just because your music's in the cloud, that doesn't mean it's safe forever.
It also made a lot of fans nostalgic for the days when Myspace was a major site for music discovery. Because users were encouraged to soundtrack their profiles, Myspace became a launching pad for artists ranging from Lily Allen to Arctic Monkeys to Kate Nash. The platform peaked in 2006, when it surpassed Google as America's most-visited website. A couple of years later it was overtaken worldwide by Facebook, which has never made music central to its user experience. (Stereogum)
https://www.thecurrent.org/feature/2019/03/18/myspace-loses-50-million-songs
