Myspace has corrupted and lost 12 years of music uploaded to its website

Remember Myspace? Or when Justin Timberlake bought a stake in the social network? Well, it has emerged on Reddit that the company has lost every audio file that users uploaded to its servers between 2003 and 2015. Over those 12 years, people uploaded over 50 million songs, which Myspace has now admitted it has corrupted while trying to migrate files to new servers.

The company stated the following in an email, which has now been made public on Reddit:

...Due to a server migration files were corrupted and unable to be transferred over to our updated site. There is no way to recover the lost data.

Myspace has also listed the following 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. We apologize for the inconvenience. If you would like more information, please contact our Data Protection Officer at [email protected].

Let that sink in for a moment. The company that claimed to be "the world's largest streaming library" and which News Corporation bought for US$580 million in 2006, has botched a server move so badly that it has destroyed the thing underpinning its identity?

The social network still had 50 million unique visitors a month in 2015 according to The Wall Street Journal, but we suspect that has trailed off somewhat considering its diminishing online presence; it has not tweeted since 2017. This is the latest in a litany of file-related issues that Myspace has had since for over a year. Some Redditors posted over a year ago that some music would not play on the social network and could not be found even when digging deeper into the HTML of its website. Moreover, the company also lists on its website that FLV files can no longer be played or downloaded, reportedly because it updated its video player to HTML5.