MySpace deletes 12 years of music and other content

March 19, 2019

CBS News,

MySpace, the pioneering but faded website that helped kick off the social-media era during the dot-com boom, says all the music uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015 is, well, history.

“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,” the company announced last weekend. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”

The MySpace announcement, reportedly made in a since-removed banner on its site, came after participants in a tech-focused group on Reddit called attention to the deletion of, by some accounts, more than 50 million songs from 14 million artists.

Andy Balo, former chief technology officer of crowdfunding platform Kickstarter, took to social media to question whether the deletion had been a mistake, saying he was “deeply skeptical this was an accident.”

I’m deeply skeptical this was an accident. Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than “we can’t be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s.”

— Andy Baio (@waxpancake) March 18, 2019

MySpace’s data protection officer did not respond to a request for comment.

At one time the world’s fasted-growing social network, MySpace was purchased for $580 million in 2005 by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. Credited with helping launch the careers of artists including Kate Nash and Arctic Monkeys, MySpace failed to keep pace with other music-sharing platforms such as Facebook and YouTube. News Corp. sold MySpace in 2011 to a digital ad company Specific Media for about $35 million, before being sold along with parent Viant to Time in 2016.