People old enough to remember the earliest days of social media will recall a time when networking platform MySpace was the top destination on the Internet, even bigger than Facebook and Google. In fact, there once was a thing called the "MySpace Generation," which helped launch the careers of artists including Lily Allen and Arctic Monkeys.
Indeed, for a time, MySpace operated as a platform for blossoming musicians to upload songs, where fans could then go and organically discover them, minus any industry middlemen. But now, in a sad erasure of digital memories, a MySpace "server migration" has resulted in a massive, irrecoverable data loss.
"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 site informed its users with a banner message on March 18, as reported by The Guardian. "We apologize for the inconvenience and suggest that you retain your backup copies. If you would like more information, please contact our data protection officer."
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Rumors and reports surrounding uploads that were no longer available have been circulating for more than a year, and Ars Technica summarized some of the support messages that assisted in letting users know whether their "content is no longer available and cannot be retrieved."
Despite its arguable irrelevance in today's social-media and music-discovery sphere, MySpace was at one point home to more than 14 million musicians, who uploaded more than 50 million tracks, all of which has been lost. (Unless they backed up their work, which sincerely we hope that they did.)
