From 2003 to 2012, Myspace was the premier place for bands to post their music. In 2018, it lost it all in a botched server migration. The Internet Archive has managed to get their hands on a collection of nearly half a million songs, and has made them available in a searchable interface. Please enjoy exploring the collection below.
This is cool! I used to have a big collection of mid-00s internet music that I ripped from MySpace, Epitonic, SongFight, and Shoutcast streams. I unfortunately lost nearly all of it to a hard...
This is cool! I used to have a big collection of mid-00s internet music that I ripped from MySpace, Epitonic, SongFight, and Shoutcast streams. I unfortunately lost nearly all of it to a hard drive failure many years ago, and at this point my memory of many of those artists is lost to time.
I looked around for some I remember and found some early stuff from Brad Sucks (yes, that’s his artist name). I really like “Dirtbag.”
He actually continued putting out music and released several albums, including one this year (that I just learned about right now and will have to give a listen!).
EDITS: I keep finding more.
Early JoCo is on here. A lot of people love “Code Monkey” (and it is a genuine classic — “Code Monkey think maybe manager wanna write goddamn login page himself”), but I’m more partial to the dark delightful villainy of “Skullcrusher Mountain”.
“Secrets from the Future” is MC Frontalot rapping about encryption and mentions the year 2025 as being far in the future, which, uh, just made me crumble away into dust.
“Having Trouble Concentrating” by The Cow Exchange is a throwback to the days of spam emails. Anyone remember how they used to include a bunch of nonsensical machine-generated keyword sentences to try to get around spam filters? (I think they were called Markov chains?). The lyrics for this song were written using a generator for one of those (a proto-LLM!). My favorite part is the end where it gets stuck in a loop.
Josh Woodward’s “Cherry” is catchy. I bought some of his albums off of CDBaby. “Brown Boxes” (MP3) is way better but isn’t on the site.
Oh my god, I keep playing memory associations in my head and uncovering long-lost stuff. I absolutely adored this song: deshead’s “I Meant to Remember”. His “High Enough” is also good.
Okay, this isn’t actually on the site, but it’s still in the same spirit (it’s from a 2005 Song Fight). Minty Handy’s quite literally NSFW duet “Our Love Violates Corporate Policy” (MP3) is still hilarious. I used to sing the “photocopy my ass” countermelody to myself all the time.
Aaaand now I’m exploring old Song Fights I remember from twenty(!!!) years ago (all links are direct MP3 links). add’s “Systematic Panic” is a masterpiece. Ants (Invisible)’s “Everybody Now” is a vibe. Puce’s “Bioluminescence” is a banger about, well, bioluminescence. Southwest Statistic’s “Massive Intelligence Failure” is possibly the most quintessentially mid-00s sounding song to ever exist. The Cow Exchange’s (them again!) “Capsaicin” is a fever dream of a song about pepper-spraying invading aliens.
Brad Sucks! I Command You To Be My Woman lives in my head rent-free. IIRC he was a MetaFilter user who used to post on MeFi Music? Maybe still does, I haven't visited there in years. Did you know...
Brad Sucks! I Command You To Be My Woman lives in my head rent-free. IIRC he was a MetaFilter user who used to post on MeFi Music? Maybe still does, I haven't visited there in years. Did you know him from there also?
No, I wasn’t ever on Metafilter. I don’t definitively remember how I found him, but it was probably through SongFight. He won a few of those, and I was big into that site back in the day. Very...
No, I wasn’t ever on Metafilter. I don’t definitively remember how I found him, but it was probably through SongFight. He won a few of those, and I was big into that site back in the day. Very surprised to see that it’s still going, to be honest!
That’s amazing! There was an artist that had some stuff published there. I really enjoyed it, and I couldn’t find it anywhere else. Every now and then I'd go back to some semi-dead MySpace just to...
That’s amazing! There was an artist that had some stuff published there. I really enjoyed it, and I couldn’t find it anywhere else. Every now and then I'd go back to some semi-dead MySpace just to listen to his stuff, until it eventually went away. Seeing this just took me on a nostalgia trip, and I’m so happy you shared it. Thank you!
It's the solo work from Gene Louis, and yes, it's available! This song in particular has a very special place in my heart because at the time I wasn't fluent in english, and I remember trying to...
It's the solo work from Gene Louis, and yes, it's available!
This song in particular has a very special place in my heart because at the time I wasn't fluent in english, and I remember trying to transcribe the lyrics by myself. I even emailed what I believed to be his email address asking for the lyrics for the song, but with no luck.
Years later I started guitar classes, and I revisited this song again with my teacher to learn the chord progression and how to play it (still couldn't sing it!).
Only a couple of weeks after I had moved to Dublin, I went to the show of his band Bullets and Octane. I was used to shows starting very late where I'm from, so I arrived late and missed the gig! No chance to ask for the lyrics there again!
Now with this archive available, I once again got a chance to give it another listen -- and realise how far my english skills have come, I could understand almost the whole thing. I got an AI to transcribe the tricky bits, but I can finally play and sing the correct words.
As someone who learned english through music and games (thanks in part to this song), I feel a strong connection to some songs even though they aren't necessarily great.
Coincidentally, Harke just released a video about defunct music sharing websites. Might be worth watching if you're feeling nostalgic for music of that era.
Found some more context about what this is in an article from The Verge from 2019, which is the year lostmyspace.com was created:...
Found some more context about what this is in an article from The Verge from 2019, which is the year lostmyspace.com was created:
The Internet Archive has published a catalogue of 490,000 MySpace songs uploaded to the service between 2008 and 2010 that were previously thought lost as a result of a botched server migration. These songs are less than one percent of the estimated 50 million tracks uploaded between 2003 and 2015 that the once dominant social network accidentally deleted.
The source of the saved tracks is an “anonymous academic group” that was studying music networks while MySpace was still active. As part of their research, it downloaded 1.3 terabytes of music from the service. Later, when the news of the data loss emerged, it contacted the Internet Archive and offered to send it the files.
This is cool! I used to have a big collection of mid-00s internet music that I ripped from MySpace, Epitonic, SongFight, and Shoutcast streams. I unfortunately lost nearly all of it to a hard drive failure many years ago, and at this point my memory of many of those artists is lost to time.
I looked around for some I remember and found some early stuff from Brad Sucks (yes, that’s his artist name). I really like “Dirtbag.”
He actually continued putting out music and released several albums, including one this year (that I just learned about right now and will have to give a listen!).
EDITS: I keep finding more.
Early JoCo is on here. A lot of people love “Code Monkey” (and it is a genuine classic — “Code Monkey think maybe manager wanna write goddamn login page himself”), but I’m more partial to the dark delightful villainy of “Skullcrusher Mountain”.
“Secrets from the Future” is MC Frontalot rapping about encryption and mentions the year 2025 as being far in the future, which, uh, just made me crumble away into dust.
“Having Trouble Concentrating” by The Cow Exchange is a throwback to the days of spam emails. Anyone remember how they used to include a bunch of nonsensical machine-generated keyword sentences to try to get around spam filters? (I think they were called Markov chains?). The lyrics for this song were written using a generator for one of those (a proto-LLM!). My favorite part is the end where it gets stuck in a loop.
Plunderphonics pioneer Girl Talk is on here.
Josh Woodward’s “Cherry” is catchy. I bought some of his albums off of CDBaby. “Brown Boxes” (MP3) is way better but isn’t on the site.
Oh my god, I keep playing memory associations in my head and uncovering long-lost stuff. I absolutely adored this song: deshead’s “I Meant to Remember”. His “High Enough” is also good.
Okay, this isn’t actually on the site, but it’s still in the same spirit (it’s from a 2005 Song Fight). Minty Handy’s quite literally NSFW duet “Our Love Violates Corporate Policy” (MP3) is still hilarious. I used to sing the “photocopy my ass” countermelody to myself all the time.
Aaaand now I’m exploring old Song Fights I remember from twenty(!!!) years ago (all links are direct MP3 links). add’s “Systematic Panic” is a masterpiece. Ants (Invisible)’s “Everybody Now” is a vibe. Puce’s “Bioluminescence” is a banger about, well, bioluminescence. Southwest Statistic’s “Massive Intelligence Failure” is possibly the most quintessentially mid-00s sounding song to ever exist. The Cow Exchange’s (them again!) “Capsaicin” is a fever dream of a song about pepper-spraying invading aliens.
Brad Sucks! I Command You To Be My Woman lives in my head rent-free. IIRC he was a MetaFilter user who used to post on MeFi Music? Maybe still does, I haven't visited there in years. Did you know him from there also?
No, I wasn’t ever on Metafilter. I don’t definitively remember how I found him, but it was probably through SongFight. He won a few of those, and I was big into that site back in the day. Very surprised to see that it’s still going, to be honest!
That’s amazing! There was an artist that had some stuff published there. I really enjoyed it, and I couldn’t find it anywhere else. Every now and then I'd go back to some semi-dead MySpace just to listen to his stuff, until it eventually went away. Seeing this just took me on a nostalgia trip, and I’m so happy you shared it. Thank you!
If it's no bother, who was the artist? Are their works available in the archive?
It's the solo work from Gene Louis, and yes, it's available!
This song in particular has a very special place in my heart because at the time I wasn't fluent in english, and I remember trying to transcribe the lyrics by myself. I even emailed what I believed to be his email address asking for the lyrics for the song, but with no luck.
Years later I started guitar classes, and I revisited this song again with my teacher to learn the chord progression and how to play it (still couldn't sing it!).
Only a couple of weeks after I had moved to Dublin, I went to the show of his band Bullets and Octane. I was used to shows starting very late where I'm from, so I arrived late and missed the gig! No chance to ask for the lyrics there again!
Now with this archive available, I once again got a chance to give it another listen -- and realise how far my english skills have come, I could understand almost the whole thing. I got an AI to transcribe the tricky bits, but I can finally play and sing the correct words.
As someone who learned english through music and games (thanks in part to this song), I feel a strong connection to some songs even though they aren't necessarily great.
I love thr connection you have to the song, it makes an archive like this even better to know the memories it brings with it to people!
Pretty neat -- a little bummed that my band from high school didn't seem to be archived, but that's probably for the best
Coincidentally, Harke just released a video about defunct music sharing websites. Might be worth watching if you're feeling nostalgic for music of that era.
Found some more context about what this is in an article from The Verge from 2019, which is the year lostmyspace.com was created:
https://www.theverge.com/2019/4/4/18295014/myspace-lost-songs-dragon-project-tracks-web-archive-internet-archive-450000-recovery