Some deleted MySpace music tracks are back from the dead

MySpace conducted a server migration activity last month that resulted in 50 million songs getting accidentally deleted. However, an anonymous academic group had a copy of those tracks during their research work and now peace is restored.

According to The Verge, the group was studying music networks while MySpace was still active and as part of their research, it downloaded 1.3 terabytes of music from the service. When the news of the data loss broke out, the group contacted the Internet Archive and agreed to share the files.

The Internet Archive has now published a catalogue of 490,000 MySpace songs uploaded to the service between 2008 and 2010. These songs are less than one percent of the estimated 50 million songs which were lost during the botched migration.

The retrieved collection is now available through an online interface designed to resemble MySpace's original music player. You can search through the database using the 'Hobbit' searcher.