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So, I've been working with the Myspace Dragon Hoard over the last week ( https://archive.org/details/myspace_dragon_hoard_2010), and have some new info to contribute, and a new music player to announce. /cc @textfiles @archiveteam @internetarchive @waxpancake
It turns out that I just happened to conduct a full crawl of Myspace Music artists around 2009: name, location, fans, views, plays, hits, last update, GENRES. It fits the Hoard database (2008-2010) like a glove: after merging, only 32 artists are missing location info (0.0003%).
In 2009, Myspace Music had approximately 4.5 million artists. The Dragon Hoard contains 119,951 unique artists, so I believe it represents approx. 3% of the artists on Myspace in 2009. I have no info on total # of songs, but likely in the tens of millions (now lost forever).
Genres are on an artist basis, not song basis. Sometimes the artist supplied genre... doesn't match the song well, unless you like to pair your christian rap with screamcore butt metal. But overall, it works. There's a list of the song genre counts here: https://gist.github.com/kyledrake/047fdd10a6f481c5a61ed706898390aa
I've been listening to the Dragon Hoard for days. Some of it is terrible, some of it is good, and some of it might change your life. News and statistics fail to portray the tragedy of the loss. In order to really understand how tragic it is, you really need to -listen- to it.
So I made a music player that will enable everyone to easily take a deep dive on the lost music of Myspace and get a better understanding of what was lost. It's fun, but my hope is it also raises awareness for future travelers that WE MUST PRESERVE DIGITAL CREATIVITY BETTER.
Introducing Mydora: a continuous streaming music player that allows you to listen to the Myspace Dragon Hoard archive: 490k recovered songs from 120k artists, with filtering by genre (+ more soon). Please enjoy (and forgive the weird Outrun aesthetic) https://mydora.club
