Table of contentsThe fall of a social media goliathThe advent of MySpace and the digital dark agesMySpace's mark in popular cultureBefore Facebook took over controlling the Internet and stealing the social lives of Internet users, there was a social networking site that permeated the early years of the social media era: MySpace. Somehow it still exists today despite the three social media giants (Facebook, Twitter and Instagram) dominating the competition almost entirely, leaving MySpace in the dust. Perhaps users from the early years still return to the website from time to time, revisiting the music files they downloaded. Unfortunately, this can no longer happen for many MySpace users since 53 million files have reportedly disappeared from the site. Say no to plagiarism. Get a tailor-made essay on “Why Violent Video Games Should Not Be Banned”? Get the original essay The Fall of a Social Media Goliath The deteriorating state of the once-dominant social media platform has just gone from bad to worse. Files uploaded to MySpace before 2016 could disappear permanently, the company recently said on its website. The accidental deletion of these files happened after the website underwent a server migration project, but the cause of the sudden disappearance of the files has not yet been revealed. “Due to a server migration project, photos, videos, and audio files you downloaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace,” the company said in a notice in line published Monday. “We apologize for the inconvenience caused.” An estimated 53 million songs were removed from the site's database, all from around 14 million artists. However, it remains unclear exactly how many of these music files have been uploaded by users since MySpace announced in 2013 that it contained more than 52 million songs from record labels as well as its users. Since then, publications have speculated that the data loss could be due to MySpace's poor archiving practices since the social networking company refused to answer questions regarding the incident, thus failing to provide further details on what happened. has passed. However, according to Pitchfork's Damon Krukowsi, the massive MySpace data loss actually happened months ago, and only a few noticed the incident until MySpace itself revealed to everyone that it suffered a data loss, suggesting that people and publications have already lost interest in the social networking site in favor of even overlooking an incident that would have made headlines if it had happened on a more popular platform like Facebook. “The growing disdain for MySpace suggests a collective loss of interest in the type of history we associate with archives – a reconstruction of a specific moment in the past,” Krukowski wrote. One of the artists trying to recover lost music on MySpace is Jordan Tallent, who contacted the site's company after songs from his former band Where Got Ghost mysteriously disappeared. In an email, MySpace responded to Tallent, where it was informed of the loss of data in the site's archives. However, the email states that only those that were uploaded to the site before 2013 were lost. “If you had a MySpace profile before 2013, some content related to classic MySpace accounts (posts, comments, blogs, videos, etc.) is no longer available for retrieval or download, because they do not have.