This article covers a simple method to access deleted music collection of MySpace. MySpace was one of the most popular social network site of its time and widely used by users for music hosting. But just like everything else, the service had its day and lost its user base to new social networks like Facebook, Tumblr, etc. Recently, during a server migration, MySpace lost over 50 million songs from 15 million artists that have been uploaded between 2003 and 2015 which is impossible to recover.
Thankfully, Internet Archive has a backup of the songs uploaded on MySpace between 2008 and 2010. It has around 1.3 terabytes data that contains around 5,00,000 songs. All this data is dumped on Internet Archive in forms of over 100 ZIP files. It’s not easy to search data from ZIP files so, an online tool is made available that lets you search and play songs from the giant backup. Let’s check out this tool in details and see how it works.
Also read: Free Self-Hosted Wayback Machine to Save Web Pages in Archives
Access Deleted Music Collection of MySpace
The Hobbit is an online tool by Internet Archive that provides a searchable interface to access the backup of MySpace music uploaded on the site between 2008 and 2010. This tool has media controls along with a seek bar and box to show song info. Below the controls, it provides a search bar for searching the songs.
When you open this tool, it takes a minute to generate an index of the data. After that, you can type a song/artist name and search the collection. The first search takes a few seconds to get the results and after that, the subsequent searches are quick and easy.
From the results, you can simply tap a song to play it online in the player. You can seek it backward, forward, and play next, previous songs just like a regular music player. In the results, each song has a Download button below its name. With this button, you can download the respective songs as an MP3 file.
Closing Words:
This is how you can still access the music collection of MySpace from the Internet Archive. This tool lets you play and download songs but there is no link between the songs and archive. So, you can not go to an archive from a song. All you can do is search. Also, some songs are not the complete song they are just short clips.
