We have a special place in our hearts for Myspace. It wasn't the original social network, but it was the first to reach mass appeal and was a big part of what helped Metal Injection succeed in the early days, in terms of promotion.
MySpace went through a few iterations. There was the OG phase, which is the Tom era. Then, they sold the company to Fox for $600 million, and I feel that's when things really exploded, with custom Myspace page templates, song premieres and the like. Then, Facebook came and drank Myspace's milkshake and all was left was a graveyard of old memories. But that graveyard is now gone. Over 50 million songs from 14 million artists are now gone.
A Reddit user noticed last February that his old music uploads were not appearing on his page. He contacted Myspace and got this message:
There is an issue with all songs/videos uploaded over 3 years ago. We are aware of the issue and I have been informed the issue will be fixed, however, there is no exact time frame for when this will be completed. Until this is resolved the option to download is not available. I apologize for the inconvenience this may be causing.
Please also note, all FLV videos can no longer be played due to an update to the player. We updated our player to HTML5. Unfortunately, we do not offer a way to play or download these videos.
That last part seems crazy! They just don't care about all their old media.
Then, earlier this weekend, a tweeter followed up and learned the truth. Due to an issue with backups, during a server migration, all media uploaded from 2003-2015 has been lost.
https://t.co/m4itH5Hx1u Just in case you're wondering how it's going. pic.twitter.com/3O5l551F7e
— Jason Scott (@textfiles) March 17, 2019
Time Inc. currently owns the website, and let's hope they do a better job of maintaining the files.
What is your favorite Myspace memory?