Industry Insights: The Death of an Era: The Lost Music History of MySpace

Before Gen Z was even old enough to use social media, Millenials were coding their favorite songs onto their MySpace profiles. But all evidence of MySpace Music has vanished without a trace.

Industry Insights explores the inner workings of the greater music industry, and what they mean for artists and fans alike.

Written and illustrated by Micaela Garza

In the heyday of social networking, the distant cries of dial-up modems faded into oblivion, as broadband routers took their rightful places in homes across the United States. All the while, teenagers took their rightful places in front of the family computer to enjoy the designated online space for their group antics: MySpace — “a place for friends.” Although our Top 8 friend Tom Anderson’s creation was widely abandoned in the early 2010s, the platform still held a nostalgic place in people's hearts. Well, until a Reddit user broke the news of a mass data migration that corrupted millions of files in 2015. 

Without sufficient backups of these corrupted files, the platform permanently lost every piece of user media that was uploaded on the site prior to 2015. Among that data was 50 million songs uploaded by 14 million artists, leaving many former users without any way to bask in the memories of their emo-scene-indie-alt eras. Not only did MySpace lose music made by thousands of amateur artists, it also lost original uploads of songs by bands and big pop names who got their humble start on the platform. Thus, an era of music history is gone forever.

The OG social network equipped many average users with rudimentary coding skills as they embedded autoplay profile songs into their layouts. Musicians, however, saw an opportunity to take advantage of the platform, and how it “sought to amass an audience around entertainment content,” by uploading their raw, unpolished songs and videos to the dedicated MySpace Music page. 

A number of popular millennial artists who ruled the 2010s had humble beginnings on the social network. The Arctic Monkeys got their start on the platform when dedicated fans created their MySpace page for them. And after talent scouts stumbled across the band on the site, the quartet later landed a record deal.. Powerhouse pop-soul vocalist Adele also sits among those who owe their rise to stardom to the social platform. The lyricist once said in an interview with E! News, “I mean, I owe my whole career to my friend Lindsay. He put me on MySpace. I was on it from like, New Year’s Eve of 2004, and then it blew up because of Lily Allen and the Arctic Monkeys,” she explained. “My friend Jack was in Lily’s ‘Top Friends,’ and Lily was huge, and then I got spotted like that.” Although all evidence of Adele’s music having ever been on the nostalgic social network has disappeared, for those hoping to reminisce, she can still be seen and heard in 144p singing an acoustic version of “Daydreamer,” the lead track off of her debut album 19.

Image Courtesy of Nicki Minaj

Despite Gen Z graduating to Tik Tok, the sheer magnitude of MySpace’s impact on the music industry can still be felt today. In late 2020, Nicki Minaj celebrated the tenth anniversary of her debut solo album, Pink Friday. Paying tribute to the platform that created the foundation of her career, the rap star converted her website into an original MySpace-themed layout, dubbed “NickiSpace.” Complete with the iconic orange and green “Online Now!” GIF, and the characteristically customizable “Top 8” friends that made the platform so popular among young millennials, Minaj’s decision to evoke mid-aughts aesthetics in her anniversary campaign added salt in the wound for those wishing they could go back and experience what the platform once had to offer. 

Alongside the pop artists who used the platform was a hoard of bands that were able to branch out from local scenes and onto the map, attracting record deals from labels like Epitaph and Reprise Records. In the early days of their career, beloved emo band My Chemical Romance put free downloads of their demos up on their MySpace to promote themselves. They were even name-dropped in a 2005 article for Wired. Journalist David Cohn noted that “startup bands like My Chemical Romance have launched careers exclusively through MySpace, collecting more than 100,000 fans through the service.” As they pioneered every 2000s alt band’s most-used marketing tactic, they inspired the popular post-hardcore bands who ruled the scene and emo subcultures, such as Escape the Fate who came out of Las Vegas and Black Veil Brides who hailed from Cincinnati (pretty much the entirety of the 2009 Vans Warped tour lineup).

These bands didn’t just post music to their MySpace pages, though. They used the platform to promote upcoming tour dates; band members also posted countless photos with fans on their personal pages, along with status updates and blog posts about how they were feeling or what they were up to. Fans could even add their favorite band members as friends, deepening the connection between bands and their fanbases so much more than the social media users of today could ever imagine possible — a connection far beyond a mere “follow.”

This era of social networking is far gone, and early demos and countless songs that were never professionally recorded have been lost forever. For all of the garage bands that never made it past high school-aged home recordings, the platform served as a retrieval hub for some of the best memories a teenager could have possibly made. The odds that any of these bands or artists have the original hard drive and GarageBand files of their earliest work seems slim, especially considering the reliance that Internet users have on Cloud-based data services now, or the archival process of social media platforms like MySpace. A theory has blown up on a similar Reddit thread that outed MySpace’s mistake, surmising that the “corrupted files” are really a cleverly worded, deceptive cover-up for a dying company that no longer wanted the financial responsibility of hosting 50 million ancient files on its servers. 

Whatever the case may be, there is a smidgen of hope for those who are mourning the collective loss. For anyone with enough time on their hands or enough room on their hard drives, 1.3 terabytes of data, dubbed “The MySpace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010),” is available  on The Internet Archive. The archive has a compilation of 490,000 songs “accomplished using unknown means by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010,” according to the site. This large user-compiled file might have the only available copy of some of these lost songs, but it’s only a mere fraction of all that was lost in the server transfer. It’s worth digging through for the many hopefuls who long to find their stolen memories once again. And who knows, perhaps edgy TikTok Zoomers might find some foregone lo-fi tracks they like and make them viral one day.

The mass migration of 2011 sent many MySpace users to Facebook and Twitter, but the social network remained active — dormant, but still active. In that sense, it became a chronicle for years of media and history, not just for musicians but their fans, too. Sure, the musicians had moved on to bigger and better things, likely utilizing PR teams courtesy of their record labels to promote music rather than doing it themselves. And yes, many of them had uploaded their music onto other websites such as YouTube, meaning original demos were still available to some degree. But MySpace offered more than just music to early Internet users — it offered a community, a special kind of online culture that blanketed nearly every musical genre, from indie to emo to rap, and music fans from all walks of life. It wasn’t just the loss of music that made the MySpace data crisis so significant, it was the loss of an entire subculture, an entire era of music history. To that, we can only say, Rest In Peace, MySpace. You will be dearly missed.

This article was added to Industry Insights after its publication, upon the creation of the Industry Insights series.