In 2019, MySpace revealed that it had accidentally lost more than 50 million songs uploaded to the platform between 2003 and 2015. The incident erased music from over 14 million artists and became one of the biggest losses of digital music in internet history. Musicians and users were left shocked as years of creative work suddenly disappeared. So how did MySpace lose 12 years of music?
How MySpace became a sensation
MySpace was created by USC student Chris DeWolfe and software developer Tom Anderson. The duo purchased the MySpace(.com) domain for $5,000 and launched the website in the summer of 2003 together with the digital marketing company, eUniverse. The idea behind the website was to make a platform for social interaction, mainly for musicians.
The website allowed a high level of customization with personalized profiles including a biography, background, images and music. Its customizable features and friend networks looked much like social media does today. MySpace quickly gained popularity and had more than a million users just within a year after its launch. In 2005, MySpace was acquired for $580 million dollars by News Corporation. At its peak in April of 2008, MySpace had around 115 million monthly unique users. It accounted for 13 % of all internet traffic in the U.S.
Facebook, another emerging social media platform, which earlier only had allowed students to join its platform started allowing non-students in 2006. By 2008, the platform had grown so large that it started overtaking the website. MySpace struggled with a series of technical challenges including frequent crashes and slow load times. As MySpace declined, a new generation of artists started looking elsewhere to upload, share and discover music. One of the platforms that filled that gap was SoundCloud, which later changed underground music completely. Ultimately, users started leaving MySpace. In 2011, News Corporation sold MySpace to Specific Media Group and Justin Timberlake for just $35 million.
The 2016 MySpace data breach
After the stagnation of the website, MySpace had to let go of more than half of its employees. The company was again sold a number of times to different companies. In May of 2016, MySpace was exposed to a data breach on the dark web. Over hundreds of millions of hacked account details including addresses, passwords, usernames and e-mail addresses from the website were advertised for sale on the “Real Deal”, a dark web website. It’s still to this day, known as one of the world’s largest data thefts.
What caused the 2019 MySpace data loss?
In 2019, MySpace announced that it had lost all content uploaded to the site before 2016. The company blamed a faulty server for the mass deletion during a server migration project in February of 2018. Users, both active and non-active, started panicking. The tech reporter and cofounder of Kickstarter Andy Baio estimated the loss at 50 million songs from over 14 million artists. Some critics questioned whether the data loss was accidental or not. In a tweet, Baio stated “Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than ‘we can’t be bothered with the effort of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s’”.
Lead singer Johnny 3 Tears from the band Hollywood Undead told TMZ “they probably didn’t want to spend money to move them from server to server, or whatever they would’ve had to do … so they just said ‘oh, oops, they’re gone’”.
MySpace has since received major backlash for its handling of data and is often used as an example of how not to manage cybersecurity. According to Forbes, security researchers discovered that MySpace’s account recovery system required only basic personal information such as a username, name, email address, and date of birth. Since this type of information is often publicly available online, hackers could potentially gain access with repeated attempts. The recovery system also lacked strong protections against brute-force attacks, meaning hackers could repeatedly attempt to access accounts without being effectively blocked.
Conclusion
The MySpace data loss incident shows how years of musical history can vanish in an instant due to poor data management. For many artists, including Arctic Monkeys and Avicii, the platform served as a gateway to share their music with the world, and the files stored there represented years of creativity and cultural moments from the early internet era. When the data vanished, so did a large part of its history. The incident has since become a reminder of the risks of relying entirely on online platforms to store important files.