Myspace loses 12 years worth of music in botcher server migration

Fallen social media giant Myspace has admitted to losing 12 years worth of music following a botched server migration.

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An estimated 50m songs from 14m artists that were uploaded onto the website between 2003 and 2015 are lost, the once-great social network said.

The firm blamed a server migration issue, which wiped the first 12 years of data stored on the site, including photos, videos and audio files.

“As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from MySpace,” the company said in a statement. “We apologise for the inconvenience.”

But former Kickstarter CTO Andy Baio said he was “sceptical” that the data loss was an accident, tweeting: “Flagrant incompetence may be bad PR, but it still sounds better than 'we can't be bothered with the effort and cost of migrating and hosting 50 million old MP3s”.

Originally founded in 2003, Myspace became the world's pre-eminent social platform in its early years.

The site helped launch the careers of artists like the Arctic Monkeys, Adele, and Lily Allen, all performers who were discovered on the platform.

However, Facebook soon overtook Myspace to become the world's largest social network, and since then the site has been redesigned to focus more on music discovery.

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Myspace boasts the title of the world's digital music library, a claim that may be in danger due to the recent data lost.