Myspace's music purge is the latest cultural scrubbing we'll regret | Will Cox

Bob Dylan's first acting role was wiped because it took up space. What might we mourn from 50m songs deleted from Myspace?

Back when people still bought CDs and streaming media was a slow and frustrating experience, my teenage band recorded a number of average songs and put them out. I have copies of two of the three EPs we released. What didn't get committed to those low-print-run, landfill-fodder discs was uploaded to our MySpace and left to float in the digital forever of the internet.

Two weeks ago, MySpace announced on their front page that everything uploaded to the site between 2003 and 2015 had been lost in a botched "server migration project". The entire golden age of MySpace (and several years after the golden age) has been wiped, including an estimated 50m songs from 14 million artists. It may have happened as far back as a year ago, but MySpace have kept quiet. Some were sceptical it was an accident. "We apologise for the inconvenience," Myspace said.