Slashdot Mirror

← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)

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

Posted by msmash on from the come-to-the-rescue dept.

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.

10 of 30 comments (clear)

  1. Backups by Scutter · · Score: 4, Insightful

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

    --

    "Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
    1. Re: Backups by weilawei · · Score: 1

      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.

    2. Re:Backups by dristoph · · Score: 3, Interesting

      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.

    3. Re:Backups by Malizar · · Score: 1

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

  2. Like a tree in the forest by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

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

    1. Re:Like a tree in the forest by The+Grim+Reefer · · Score: 3, Funny
      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.

  3. Good for them. by Major_Disorder · · Score: 3, Insightful

    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.

    --
    First law of people: People are generally stupid.
    1. Re:Good for them. by qubezz · · Score: 1

      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!

  4. Yep by Artem+S.+Tashkinov · · Score: 2

    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.

  5. The music is not lost. The LICENSE is lost. by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    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.