Yahoo Finance Myspace has deleted everything you uploaded before 2016
Every single song, photo, video and post uploaded to the original social network, Myspace, before 2016 has been lost, the company has confirmed.
That’s more than a decade’s worth of data including more than 50 million tracks from 14 million artists such as Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys.
While Myspace claims the loss was the fault of a server migration problem, internet pundits, including web expert and developer Andy Baio are less convinced it was an accident.
“I’m deeply sceptical this was an accident,” Baio wrote on Twitter.
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“Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than “we couldn’t be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s”.
The mass deletion seems to have occurred around a year ago when users started to complain of being unable to find old content, although Myspace originally said this was a temporary error.
And while it was generally understood by July last year that the content was lost, the site has now publicly admitted with a new banner on the website just this week.
The banner reads: “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 apologise for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your backup copies. If you would like more information, please contact our data protection officer.”
Yes, Myspace still exists and people still use it
Myspace was founded in 2003 and quickly found popularity among young people, musicians and artists before falling victim to Facebook’s enormous power.
However a rebrand in 2013 build a community of people who used Myspace predominantly to share and find new music, with the troubled website now looking more like an entertainment platform than a social network.
Myspace passed Google as the most visited website in 2006, and according to the Wall Street Journal, it still had 50.6 million unique monthly visitors with a user base of nearly 1 billion members.
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