The Internet Archive rescues half a million lost MySpace songs

MySpace, once the favorite social network of musicians around the world, made news in March when it was discovered that 12 years worth of music was lost during a data migration. 

A small part of that has, fortunately, been recovered by The Internet Archive. 

Called the “MySpace Dragon Hoard,” the archive holds 490,000 mp3 files from MySpace.com. The files were collected “using unknown means by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010,” the Internet Archive said in a post.

Since MySpace’s data migration (perhaps data destruction is a better way to describe it) botched everything hosted on the site before 2015, nearly none of the files in the Dragon Hoard archive can be found on MySpace. 

The archive is 1.3 terabytes big and is quite problematic, since the files are named by MySpace’s CDN (content delivery network), meaning the names don’t make sense to most humans. It is therefore accessible as a set of 144 .zip archive files, which you can browse through here. If you’re looking for something specific in there, good luck.