Myspace Dragon Hoard (Lost WorldWW Music)
In March 2019, it was announced that all the music stored on the Myspace social network since before 2015 had been permanently deleted due to supposed professional negligence. Some 50 million songs produced by around 14 million artists were gone for ever. The Internet Archive – a library that preserves digital archives – managed to recover 450,000 of the lost songs and compiled them into a vast archive called Myspace Dragon Hoard.
Myspace Dragon Hoard (Lost WorldWW Music) is a world music album that features tracks consisting of samples of recovered Myspace songs. The album will be released in digital format with the intention of being hosted on the first ever Web server, CERN httpd (installed on an old NeXT computer held at CERN in Meyrin in Switzerland). By regarding the Web server as a kind of monument, the project ponders on the material aspects of the production and distribution of music on the internet and reflects on alternative and decentralised ways of preserving and conserving our digital cultural heritage.
