Digital Music Archives - Haulix Daily

MySpace may not have maintained good backups of the media hosted on their servers, but a community of digital saviors have banded together to share nearly half a million songs previously thought lost forever.

Less than a month after MySpace confirmed the loss of over 50 million songs uploaded to the social media platform between 2003 and 2015, a group of dedicated music fans have delivered the internet a gift. 490,000 songs once hosted by MySpace are now available once more thanks to a community of so-called ‘digital hoarders’ who maintain deep and meticulously curated music libraries.

The ‘Myspace Dragon Hoard (2008-2010)‘ was published on Monday, April 1. The songs included were originally gathered by an anonymous academic study conducted between 2008 and 2010. You can stream the material using this link.

The music collection is arranged by the filenames assigned by MySpace’s Content Delivery Network, the key of which is in the metadata. file in this collection. MD5 and SHA hashes are also provided from the original and included in the main directory. There is no other information about the origin of this collection at this time.

If you’re afraid the material included may disappear again, downloads of the entire collection are available. At over 1.3 terabytes of mp3 files named by the Content Delivery Network of Myspace, this collection can best be described as unwieldy. Therefore, it has been left as a set of ZIP files (created by the Info-ZIP program) that can be browsed and viewed by using the “view content” links in the general item directory.

Spotify and Apple Music are large platforms that enable well over 100 million people to stream music every month, but their subscriber numbers pale in comparison to the number of people that visit YouTube for music videos and song streams. According to a corporate blog post from this past May, the company claims that over 1 billion people use the service to be part of music culture and discover new music. That’s roughly 14% of the total world population!

That explains why YouTube launched an app catered explicitly to music fans earlier this year. YouTube Music is billed as “a completely reimagined app and desktop product with official albums, playlists, singles and more.” Subscribers pay $10 a month to access ad-free videos, songs, albums, and playlists, as well as recommendations based on their taste. Users can also access their favorite content offline, which mirrors the offline streaming tools made available on major music streaming platforms.

Now, YouTube Music is separating itself from the competition by changing the way people search for material. A recent update to the platform allows subscribers to search using emojis, a small digital image or icon used to express an idea or emotion, as well as song lyrics.

The photo below shows the new update in action. By using the baby emoji and the number one emoji, users can now discover Brittany Spears’ timeless single “Hit Me Baby (One More Time).” Check it out:

Not sure about the title of the song you’re looking for, but know the word “bee” appears in it somewhere? Emoji search can help you there as well:

Looking for “Do You Want To Build A Snowman?” from Disney’s Frozen? Input the ‘snowman’ emoji and search away!

If you’ve got the line from a song stuck in your head but can’t think for the life of you who it’s by or what it is called, with YouTube Music search you can type in the lyrics and if they have the lyrics in their database (they do for most songs) – BOOM! The song will magically appear.

With all the recent developments from Spotify and its competition, YouTube will likely continue to roll out more updates of their own in the coming months. Follow Haulix on Facebook and Twitter for more news, advice, and guidance concerning music marketing in the digital age.