There’s a good chance that if you read this headline and clicked on it, you’re worried about your music. (I guess there’s a chance you clicked on it out of some perverse curiosity; know that you’re reading alongside a lot of people who are worried about their music.) Well, sorry, but the news isn’t great.
From BoingBoing:
It’s been a year since the music links on Myspace stopped working; at first the company insisted that they were working on it, but now they’ve admitted that all those files are lost: “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 and suggest that you retain your back up copies. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer, Dr. Jana Jentzsch at DPO@myspace.com.”
“We … suggest that you retain your back up copies,” is perhaps the saddest sentence in this release, given that it assumes these folks … have backup copies. (The data loss amounts to 50 million songs from 14 million artists.) On Twitter, some conjectured that the loss wasn’t an accident so much as a calculated decision on the part of Myspace.
Either way, that’s a lot of internet archive lost to time. Congrats to those of you who are now breathing a sigh of relief that the dumb stuff you recorded and put online in 2005 is gone forever.
