Internet Archive Recovers Half a Million 'Lost' MySpace Songs (techspot.com)

The Internet Archive has come to the rescue once again. The nonprofit digital library this week unveiled the MySpace Music Dragon Hoard, a collection of 490,000 MP3 files from 2008 to 2010 on the long-abandoned social media site. From a report: While the recovered tracks make up less than one percent of the music lost by some 14 million artists, it is still a sizable cache weighing in at 1.3TB. The lost songs were given to the Internet Archive by an "anonymous academic group" that had downloaded the music over a three year period to study. When the group learned of the data loss last month, it offered all it had to be preserved.

Comments

Yay copyright

[Anonymous Coward]

Now those pesky music pirates will never get the chance to steal trillions of dollars worth of songs!

Backups

[Scutter]

Hard to believe that 14 million artists stored their only existing copies of their songs on Myspace, with no other backups or local copies.

Re: Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

Backup? We donâ(TM)t need no stinking backup!

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

They might mostly be out there on a DVD in a parents basement, or an old computer hard drive somewhere.

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

I find that less hard to believe than the idea that a single one of them is worth listening to or preserving.

Re: Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

That's where I stored my 2009 Bitcoin wallet you insensitive clod!

Re: Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

We have backed up our songs but data loss from hard drive failures or removable media degradation is a thing.

I did have a couple tracks that got lost for these reasons.

  When i went back to MySpace to re-backup as a last resort, i discovered those songs were lost to the ether after the migration.

  Life's timing and unforeseen circumstances can be a bitch no matter how many precautions you take.

Haven't searched the database yet but If I find them, it will be a godsend.

Re: Backups

[weilawei]

Agreed, I've got a couple tracks I'm looking for from that era that escaped backing up and no one (that I know) even knows if the artist is still alive. Sometimes I'm not looking for a major label recording, but a one-off from an independent musician.

Sadly, it's slammed right now. 504.

Re:Backups

[dristoph]

A friend of mine lost the recordings from his high school band, which was just two poor kids from rural Kansas in the early aughts working with whatever equipment they could dredge up. That equipment didn't include spare hard drives, which weren't as cheap then as they are now. Even if they had backups, it's likely that the paths their lives took since then, which included moving cross country in search of a job, and living in and out of a car, would have resulted in the drives being lost or damaged at some point anyway.

For what it's worth, the music was quite good for a high school act, and in fact I became aware that something was probably wrong at MySpace months before this story was reported because I had gone to their page on a fairly regular basis to listen to them, and one day the player just didn't work. I let my friend know, and he went searching for any copies he might find, but no luck.

Obviously it's best to keep your own backups, and these days I'm moving as much off cloud services as I can, time allowing. But shit happens, and there's a difference between using the event to teach an object lesson and some of the callousness I've seen toward the people who actually lost something here. On the balance, I'd say it's not unreasonable to ask that a company which formed a business model (and, for a good while, made money) on the basis of distributing content produced by artists willing to upload their work for exposure should be expected to do the minimum so many other companies of all sizes manage to do, that being to have a backup. And if, as I kind of suspect, this was just a dying company's way of dumping costs ("oops looks like we lost everything"), it would have been decent to at least do what Geocities did and give enough warning for interested parties (including Archive.org) to retrieve what they wanted.

Anyways, I'm gonna check out this archive and see if Lady Does A Horse's songs are in there.

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

true, anything worth listening to are the 10 songs currently set to repeat on the most poplular radio station. Don't bother us with anything else

Re:Backups

[Malizar]

BUT... BUT.... It's SAFE in the Cloud!

Re:Backups

[Anonymous Coward]

As one of the many artists who lost music from this, it went down like this:

My only means of backup at the time was a single external hard drive. Unlike today's drives which receive power through USB, that drive required an external power supply. The connector was identical to another power supply for another piece of hardware that had a higher power requirement. I mistakenly used the wrong power supply with the hard drive and ended up frying the circuitry (it's possible the drive itself was fine, or that data could be corrupted,but I didn't have the means to verify at the time). While I still had a copy on my laptop, I never made another backup, years went by, I eventually retired the laptop and forgot to back-up those files before wiping the drives. At this point, my only copy of that music was the 3 mp3 files I had uploaded to myspace, but I had gotten away from doing music as other life things took priority so it became not that important. I only recently went back to try and find those files on myspace recently (after realizing myspace was still online) for nostalgia and that was when I learned that a good portion of those files were lost (you could still access the page and see those files, but couldn't play them). Shortly after that, I saw the news about the files being lost.

In summary? I didn't have a good backup system in place so it is totally my fault for losing them in the first place, though I'm also not angry at myspace in this instance since they only lost published MP3s, my own actions caused me to lose the masters. Though, music always was just a hobby for me, so it's not like I was stupid with my life's work either.

I didn't have a good back up system/practice at the time because I was in the Navy and living onboard a ship with limited storage space for personal effects. Other artists I know who have lost work just weren't technically savvy to begin with and didn't even have a backup in the first place.

Like a tree in the forest

[Anonymous Coward]

If you recover an mp3, and there is no one around to stream it, does it still make a sound?

Re:Like a tree in the forest

[The Grim Reefer]

If you recover an mp3, and there is no one around to stream it, does it still make a sound?

It doesn't matter because the RIAA lawyers will still think you owe them $400k for recovering it. It doesn't even matter if it's from an artist they have rights to.

I'm an "anonymous academic group"

[Anonymous Coward]

Porn.

Good for them.

[Major_Disorder]

I love Internet archive. So much so, that I even throw them a few $$$$ once in a while.
I spent months watching out of copyright movies. (Some are awesome.)
I have downloaded tons of abandoned software.
I have barely scratched the surface of internet Archive.

Keep up the good work.

Re:Good for them.

[qubezz]

I would say that easily 50% of the links I follow from forum posts, aging online articles and other sources these days are dead. The sites are 50% gone, and 50% restructured 2.0 versions that don't have the content or have rearranged the content management system without a thought to links. Also, manufacturers and companies just toss the info and downloads for their products as soon as it doesn't mean profit. Big ups for the Wayback Machine!

jeez that's a shame

[Anonymous Coward]

I guess APK lost all his exclusive Nsync music

Now if only they'd come rescue themselves

[Anonymous Coward]

Most of the time, when I need them or something like them, their site says "no".

They probably have the data but their utterly broken heap of crap PHP sifting through even more broken faux-XML-in-XML just can't find it. And that got old years ago. And that's the best case. It has many many worse cases. Like it telling you "neener neener" on the basis of blanket-banning robots.txt files dumped on the site by squatters, ie the domain expired, someone else snapped it up with a placeholder site and a blanket robots.txt, and they "honour" that to shut you out of the old content by a previous domain holder. That makes archive.org's usefulness rather lower than it could be. Rather a lot lower.

Yep

[Artem S. Tashkinov]

And there's this myth that everything (once released) on the web stays there forever. Looks like most people don't remember websites from the 90s and 00s most of which disappeared without a trace.

Re:Yep

[Anonymous Coward]

It's entirely unpredictable what stays forever and what gets lost.

Around 2007 I decided (based on the myth) that I didn't need to save local copies of content I liked because I could just look it up whenever I wanted. I even deleted the content I'd downloaded in the name of "data minimalism" (you can always rely on someone else to supply what you didn't bother to hold onto, right?).

But now? I wish I had a time machine so I could slap my past self in the face. Even content ~3 years old that I go looking for is gone, sometimes. If you like it, don't just click a thumbs-up button. Save it local and have redundant backups.

The music is not lost. The LICENSE is lost.

[Anonymous Coward]

Joe Tinkerer, aged 15, makes music in his bedroom. His goal is exposure and feedback. So his license is very generous. "Please use my music, tell me how you used it and what you like."

Joe moves on to other things. At age 30 he remembers his old music, and finds his his old web site is dead. So he finds his old music and puts it on Spotify or wherever, and thinks no more about it. The license now says "personal use is free, but if you charge money we want big bucks."

So we have not lost the music. We have lost the generous license.

and that affects download speed

[Anonymous Coward]

I agree with everything you say. I love archives, I run a very small one myself. But my experience of archive.org is that it is painfully slow. Often unusable. Now some people can watch movies from the site, so I guess they don't SEND the data at a slow pace. I presume it's inefficient coding?

Now I get that the site is free, and they want donations.. But they keep spending money on unnecessary features (e.g. playing games live) I have to wonder if any donated money would do any good? I wish they would focus on keeping the minimum needed, and making it actually available: paying lawyers to push back against the "remove everything" tendency, etc.

Lossless yearning

[Anonymous Coward]

Why couldn't they have saved the flac files?

The internet archive icon looks like a trash can

[Anonymous Coward]

Fitting. Cannot unsee. Someone just shoveled 1+ more terabytes onto the heap. Nice.

Woo hoo!

[Anonymous Coward]

Someone thought of the BLINK tags! \o/

Lost Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

Can they restore Mark Zuckerberg's lost Facebook messages too?

Re: Lost Messages

[Anonymous Coward]

theres already a site for that somewhere