Millions of songs on MySpace were reported lost, assumed gone forever but thankfully they’ve managed to find a chunk of them again.

Last month musicians from around the web were horrified to hear that MySpace had made a slip up at the cost of 50 million songs. The social media platform that dominated before Facebook came to rule over the internet was hub for artists but a change of server saw over 14 million artists’ music gone.

Old users of MySpace were reporting photos, videos, and audio missing for 3 years but a recent server migration was what really started the uproar. Over 50 million songs uploaded between 2003 and 2015 were thought to be lost by MySpace. They claimed that it was an accident, but many said was a result of the expense of moving so much old data.

Thankfully ‘The Internet Archive’ have just published 490,000 songs from MySpace uploaded between 2008 and 2010. The chunk of tracks was being used an anonymous academic group that were studying music networks whilst MySpace was still alive. When news of the site’s music loss was announced the group released files for the 1.3 terabytes of music they downloaded.

The Internet Archive are a notorious site for backing up the plethora of music online. They famously hosted massive backups of SoundCloud’s catalogue in 2017 after rumours spread that the service might close thanks to multiple layoffs.

Unfortunately whilst this chunk was recovered the fate of the other 49+ million is likely to remain the same as it is.