MySpace have been forced to apologize after accidentally deleting around 12 years worth of content. Long ago, before social media became embroiled in political debate and was accused of influencing democratic elections, were the (mostly) innocent days of MySpace. A predecessor to Facebook and Twitter, MySpace was a place for selfies, discovering new bands and trading pic comments with friends, at a time when nobody had heard of “bots” or given a second thought to Dumbledore’s sexuality. During its best years, MySpace was also a powerful tool in the 2000s music scene, helping artists such as Fall Out Boy, Arctic Monkeys and Adele rise to prominence and the site even allowed users to have an artist’s song play when people visited their own profile.
That was until Mark Zuckerberg came along and offered MySpace’s aging scene kids a more mature take on the social media phenomenon with his new Facebook. MySpace attempted to hang on to its clientele with a series of updates and redesigns but these ultimately only served to push people towards newer, shinier competitors. The site never recovered and although MySpace is still in existence today, it runs on a far smaller scale with limited visibility in the mainstream.
MySpace have now suffered another major blow. As reported by CNN, a “server migration error” caused the site to lose photos, videos and songs uploaded prior to 2015. In a statement, the company said: “We apologize for the inconvenience.” The report states that this mass deletion could potentially mean the loss of some 50 million songs.
In fairness, many former MySpace users may have been unaware that the site was still in business, and even those that were likely stopped visiting years ago. As such, this loss of content may have done more damage to nostalgia than it did to the actual digital records of the 2000s generation. The vast majority of users would’ve already taken any files they wanted to keep from the site.
With that said, this will no doubt come as a cruel blow for the small group of active MySpace users, who perhaps built up a catalogue of digital memories over the years that they now no longer have access to, despite being loyal to the brand. Similarly, MySpace still enjoys a casual base of visitors who occasionally return to listen to that one awesome screamo band whose music isn’t available anywhere else. Arguably, MySpace’s influence in terms of music promotion has yet to be matched by any current social media platform but this latest indiscretion could prove the last straw for active users.
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Source: CNN
