MySpace bosses have apologised after it emerged that 12 years’ worth of music, photos and videos uploaded to the site may have been lost forever.
In a statement, the company blamed the loss of all multimedia content uploaded before 2016 on a “server migration project”.
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The admission follows several months of complaints by users that some multimedia links on the site appeared to be broken. The company initially said that they would investigate the issues, but today’s statement confirmed that the missing media cannot be recovered.
The exact scale of the loss is still unclear, but industry experts have estimated that as many as 50 million tracks by 14 million artists have been affected.
Founded in 2003, MySpace was among the first “must-have” social media platforms, peaking in popularity in 2006 before rapidly losing ground to newcomer Facebook.
“A large part of MySpace’s mid-2000s success was based off its use by musicians and music fans,” says The Fader.
The site “has been credited with helping to launch the careers of artists including the Arctic Monkeys and Kate Nash”, the BBC reports.
Some pundits, including tech entrepreneur Andy Baio, have suggested that the loss may not have been entirely accidental.
“It’s not as if the internet needed another cautionary tale about backing up data, but for many artists, this news is heartbreaking nonetheless,” says TechCrunch.
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