How to Find and Download Missing MySpace Music
Last month, I felt anxiety in the Force, as if the millions of lousy songs from 2003 to 2015 screamed in horror and suddenly fell silent. And they were. MySpace – yes it still exists – has lost all the music uploaded to the site over the years due to some corrupted data during server migration. Oops.
And while the news probably hasn’t made a difference in the lives of most people, as music-minded people have long since switched to other social media and services (like SoundCloud), all hope is not lost. A total of 490,000 MP3 files previously stored on MySpace between 2008 and 2010 have been recovered thanks to “anonymous academic research”. You can now find this archive, dubbed MySpace Dragon Hoard, at archive.org .
However, there are a few caveats about this mega collection. First, it’s huge – a whopping 1.3 terabytes, divided into 144 separate .ZIP archives. While a handy .TSV (short for Table-Separate Values) file can help you figure out what’s in an entire collection, there is no easy way to get one archive containing the small number of songs you want.
If you want to reset the specified archive to your desktop or laptop, I recommend using a tool like JDownloader, for setting in place and load all .ZIP files. Plus, you probably don’t want to do it over Wi-Fi or at your local Starbucks (or other favorite hotspot). Stick to a wired connection and hope your ISP doesn’t have annoying data restrictions.
Otherwise, you can search for individual songs and stream directly from archive.org. Just use the Hobbit tool built for this archive, which gives you a MySpace-like player and search capabilities right in your browser. It may take a while for the tool to load an index of a huge collection of MP3s, but it works – roughly. You can’t use this player for browsing , only for searching, so get ready to spend some time looking for your favorite little-known bands.
That said, this tool allows you to download individual tracks, and that’s probably all you’ll actually use this MySpace collection for. After all, the saved files represent only a small fraction of the millions of lost music tracks that are now just snippets on the big digital airwaves .