The Lost Myspace Files: Digital Archiving, Internet Music Communities, and the Challenge of Preserving Cultural Memory
Myspace, launched in 2003, was a pioneering social networking service and the first platform of its kind to reach a global audience. It had a profound impact on technology, pop culture, and the music industry. In the 1990s, music was dominated by record labels, traditional media, and physical distribution networks. Myspace disrupted this system by providing musicians with direct access to a vast audience, becoming a haven for indie music scenes worldwide. Its interface, described by users as quirky, customizable, and deeply personal, contributed to its unique appeal. However, by 2007, Myspace began losing its user base as many migrated to Facebook for social networking, while music streaming platforms like Spotify further diminished its relevance. The platform’s decline culminated in a major loss of cultural data in 2019, when Myspace announced that a failed server migration had resulted in the loss of thirteen years of user data, including an estimated fifty million files from millions of artists. The announcement provoked skepticism and distrust among former Myspace users, particularly in online communities like Reddit. Many speculated that the platform had deliberately avoided the cost of migrating such a vast archive. In response to this loss, digital archivist Jason Scott launched the “Myspace Dragon Hoard” project on the Internet Archive website, successfully preserving a collection of four hundred ninety thousand mp3 files from 2008 to 2010. Scott credited an anonymous academic group studying music networks during that period. Echoing the skepticism of Myspace users, in the text that follows the archive, Scott also questioned the company’s explanation for the data loss. In my paper, I explore how this skepticism sheds light on the broader challenges of archiving cultural data on internet platforms. Through a cultural analysis of the Lost Myspace website, I examine the implications of digital preservation for cultural memory and discuss what efforts, like the Internet Archive website, reveal about the fragility and significance of our digital heritage.
Keywords: digital archiving, cultural memory, internet music communities
Biography
Dimitra Nefeli Trigka is a research master’s student of Cultural Analysis at the University of Amsterdam. Her research interests include feminism, hauntology, embodiment, digitalculture, experimental filmmaking, and sound studies. She has previously published articles at the blog of the Institute of Network Cultures and the Kunstlicht academic journal of the Arts and Culture department of the Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam. She has also participated at the XIII Lisbon Summer School for the Study of Culture, the 2024 ASCA Workshop: Resistance, Refusal, Fugitivity, and the EASST-4S 2024 Amsterdam: Making and Doing Transformations conference.
The University of Amsterdam, The Netherlands – dimtrigka@outlook.com