Some of the roughly 50 million songs MySpace recently lost have been recovered.
The Internet Archive, a San Francisco-based nonprofit, this week posted a collection of some 490,000 MP3s it says were collected from MySpace before they were lost during a recent server migration.
Dubbed the MySpace Music Dragon Hoard, the 1.3 terabyte collection came from "an anonymous academic group," which grabbed the MP3s between 2008 and 2010 as part of a research study, according to the Internet Archive's Jason Scott.
"Someone asked me 'hey, do you want these, since they were lost?' Yes, yes I did," he wrote on Twitter Wednesday.
It's just a small fraction of the missing songs, but the Internet Archive says that "nearly every" file in the collection is no longer hosted on MySpace. So, if you lost some of your old music, it's worth checking out. The Internet Archive made it possible to search and play the songs here.
"First confirmed 'lost' song recovered from this hoard: 'the alpha conspiracy - defend yourself swing mix,' Scott added. "Creator told me it was gone forever, now it's not."
MySpace revealed the massive data loss last month, blaming a server migration project. As a result of the issue, "any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from MySpace," the company wrote. Some have speculated that wasn't an accident, instead an excuse for deciding to bypass the work and cost involved in migrating so much content.