Myspace is one of those companies that pretty much only exists in pop culture today to make a joke, and the news leaking out right now from their legal team is not something that will help to change that fate.
Given all of their changes of hand and acquisitions and whatnot, some people started poking around and wondering if they could get into their old profiles and listen to some of the stuff they may have uploaded.
Turns out that’s a problem now.
If you go to the top of their site recently, it said this:
“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.”
“We apologize for the inconvenience. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at DPO@myspace.com.”
Holy crap. That’s an entirely valuable archive and treasure trove of internet culture just down the cloud drains. Ouch. Now I’m wondering what was up there from the Phish archives that wouldn’t be anymore. Gah.
Magnetic Magazine makes a solid case of how you may want to think about this as a creator in the current market:
With all of these files gone, this is another example of why you can trust another company to hold onto your important files. As a musician, you need to have all of your music on your own drives. It can be difficult to manage, but trusting some company that can get hacked, have “glitches” / technical errors and does not care about your music like you do, will eventually lead to issues.
They reference the Internet Archive as a place to consider tossing some backups onto, which is a smart play.
All I can suggest is that you also take this news with a proper sampling of the T Bone Burnett keynote speech that was delivered this year as part of South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. He goes deep on wondering what type of life we’re giving up by providing the “surveillance capitalists” glimpses into our lives in order to create the behemoths that control our very internet consumption today. Very interesting stuff to consider with this Myspace debacle.