Myspace no longer a place for your memories
Networking site plans to delete user data downloaded before 2016
Myspace, once one of the world’s most popular websites, has long since plummeted in relevance, but for years it has provided its earliest users a place where they could revisit memories from a bygone era.
But not anymore.
A large amount of user data uploaded to the once-dominant social network before 2016 may be lost for good, the company said in a recent note on its website.
“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 firm said in the note, according to the BBC and other news sites. “We apologize for the inconvenience.”
The announcement was gone by midmorning Monday, and Myspace did not respond to repeated requests for further detail about the timing and scope of the data loss.
Many publications estimated that as many as 53 million songs from 14 million artists were affected by the data loss, but it wasn’t clear how much of that music was uploaded by users. (When Myspace rebooted in 2013, it boasted a library of 52 million songs thanks to deals with labels and uploads from users, according to reports at the time.)
The news was the latest chapter in the long decline of the once-mighty social media giant. Founded in 2003, a year before Facebook, Myspace boasted about 250 million users in the United States in its heyday.
In 2005, Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. paid $580 million to buy the site’s parent company. Around that time, Myspace.com also became the most-visited website in the United States, briefly overtaking Google. But it changed hands two more times in the last decade for a fraction of that price, as Facebook, Reddit, Twitter and other platforms lured users away.
Myspace grew to be a formidable force in music hosting, at one point amassing the biggest library in digital music. But it struggled on that front, too, eventually losing ground to other services like Spotify.
For those who kept their accounts, the news of the data loss comes as little surprise. They have complained in Reddit discussions and elsewhere about receiving similar messages from the company for more than a year. Over the weekend, the frustration spilled into sight again after a much-cited tweet by Andy Baio, a former chief technology officer of Kickstarter.
Jordan Tallent is among the Myspace users who has been trying to recover his music. Last summer, Tallent, a 26-year-old audiovideo professional in London, reached out to Myspace to ask for help recovering songs that his former post-hardcore/heavy metal band, Where Got Ghost, had uploaded to Myspace.
A representative of the company told him via email that a 2016 server migration, a transfer of data to a new server, had left some older files irreparably corrupted. But while the recent announcement said that files uploaded before 2016 may have been affected, the representative had told Tallent that only files before 2013 were missing.
“If you had a Myspace profile before 2013 certain content that
was related to classic Myspace accounts (messages, comments, blogs, videos, etc.) are no longer available for retrieval or download as they were not migrated to our redesigned website that launched in 2013,” the email read.
The email noted that Tallent had not used his account since 2014, which the representative said was “beyond the period we committed to maintain your profile data.”
The massive data loss underscores a modern danger: As we increasingly give pieces of our lives over to big tech companies, we lose control of some of our most intimate artifacts.
“We’re just going to be digital refugees forever, running from site to site losing things as we go, and our family history is going to disappear,” said Jason Scott, a founder of Archive Team, a loose network of archivists and programmers formed to save data from services at risk of disappearing.
Failures like the one at Myspace are not just personal catastrophes, Scott said. The information people share on social media can seem mundane, but it contributes to family and community histories.
“This is our modern folklore,” he said.
Myspace is hardly the first service to lose user data, intentionally or by accident. For example, the photo site Flickr began deleting some user-uploaded photos last month.
Flickr took great care to prepare its users for the deletion, Scott said, but that was a rare exception. He believes there is only one solution.
“Laws, straight-up laws,” he said. “Big old, bothersome, ‘Oh no, our startup can’t have free vodka on Friday because of the extra money we spend on certifications and holding to them’ laws.”
He and others warn this will be a recurring story, too. “Someday, this will happen to Facebook, Instagram, Tumblr, etc.,” Cory Doctorow, the author and co-editor of the tech site Boing Boing, wrote in a post. “Don’t trust the platforms to archive your data.”
But even those motivated to save their data often face hurdles. Many popular services do not make it easy to extract the photos, videos and messages that they upload.
The troubles at Myspace began almost as soon as News Corp. scooped up Intermix Media, whose main asset was Myspace, in 2005. Murdoch has conceded that his company “proceeded to mismanage it in every possible way,” ultimately selling the company in 2011 to a group of investors that included Justin Timberlake for just $35 million. The company that acquired it, Viant, an ad technology firm, describes the move on its website as being motivated by the consumer data Myspace offered.
But Myspace would never recover, even as it changed hands, strategies and designs.
In early 2016, the publisher Time Inc., bought Viant for $87 million. The following year, Meredith Corp., a media conglomerate, announced plans to buy Time. In a regulatory filing related to that deal, Time laid out its intellectual property, which it said included consumer data, and email addresses, for about 250 million unique Myspace users in the United States.
According to data provided by comScore, the media measurement company, the number of unique visitors to Myspace.com has fallen precipitously over the past four years. In February 2015, the website had nearly 29 million unique visitors. This February, it had about 2 million.
And Myspace may change hands again. After Meredith Corp. acquired Time, Inc., last year, it put Viant up for sale.