According to my best guess, I got a Myspace in 2005. It was shortly after I graduated high school… The dates are a little fuzzy. I had recently gotten a desktop computer in my bedroom and I’d started my first real job, so I had a little cash to spend. For the first time, I was questioning the beliefs my parents instilled and was attempting to establish my own truths. I had grown up living a fairly sheltered, suburban life in a small town; no cable TV. My own desktop meant that I had more freedom to explore, uninhibited by the watchful eyes of my parents. The internet was my lifeline to other cultural possibilities and Myspace became the canvas on which I awkwardly experimented with my identity.

Myspace and music were essentially synonymous. Music was an integral part of your identity on the platform, if not the most important. The selection of songs that you would choose to forcefully soundtrack those who would come and linger on your page had to be the perfect representation of you. Most Myspace pages felt like a carefully curated, online, teenage bedroom where one could put up posters of art or celebrities, paint the walls whatever digital shade struck your mood (after learning a little HTML), invite friends over to hang out, and play whatever music you wanted. Music was the epicenter of both Myspace and teenagers’ lives.

Digital music’s renaissance — iPod, illegal downloading, and digital recording software like ProTools — coincided with and created the popularity of Myspace, establishing a massive community of music-lovers, music-makers, and music-stealers. Bands and individuals uploaded millions of MP3s — some of their own music, some they’d downloaded on LimeWire. The sound of youth in 2006 was a tinny din of 128kb/s, but it was beautiful.

I noticed the slow deterioration of Myspace after multiple sales to various companies. I would check in on it every couple years to reminisce, but there was less to find every time. First, all my handwritten code was gone — no more backgrounds or custom fonts. And just as the melodrama faded from my life, the sad teenage blogs disappeared too. Finally the music I’d embedded on my page was deprecated. It wasn’t until last year that I — and the rest of the world — found out that Myspace had permanently deleted all tracks uploaded to the site between 2003 and 2015. I discovered the deletion when I tried to find music from a band I’d been in 2009. Myspace was the only copy of the tracks still in existence, as neither of us had the laptop with the original recordings. The band’s Myspace page is still there with a track listing and times for the songs, but none of them play. The interface and digital traces are visible, but the files are gone.

Myspace was the original personification of a teenage-internet: both in form and in function. There was an excitement about what the internet might become someday and what it might be able to do with it’s life. The deletion of Myspace is the end of the internet’s coming-of age. The interplay between identity, music, and digitalization that occured on Myspace is central to the personal histories of its users, but also to the history of digital music formats as a whole. However, the deletion, without warning ,of all the music uploaded to Myspace confirms fears over entrusting cultural archives to for-profit entities.

What effect did digital music have on the formation and expression of digital identity via Myspace? How does the deprecation of social media and musical formats fit into narratives of ownership, archive and corporate responsibility? I will examine the consumption, creation and cultural impact of digital music, using the story of Myspace as a central case study. I will start by looking at conceptions of identity and its relationship to music through Stuart Hall’s ‘cultural identity’ and Simon Frith’s article “Music and Identity.” I will then explore the ways that music was used to create a ‘web of identities.’ Foregrounding this conversation will be my own situated knowledge of Myspace culture and affordances. In the last section, I will look at digital concepts of ‘deprecation,’ and ‘broken links’ in relation to the cultural/personal archive that was Myspace. What have we really lost? Is loss built into digital culture? Is there a movement towards ‘loss-less’ culture? Or have we accepted that deprecation is part of digitalization?

Section 1. Music, Myspace and creation of identity
Starting with the broad concept of identity: What is an identity? It obviously depends on who you ask. Identity lacks a single definition, but variations from different fields and eras emphasize certain aspects over others, providing a breadth of perspectives.

In psychology, identity is referred to as psychological identity and has in the past been used to refer to the ways that an adolescent unites aspects and experiences from childhood into a cohesive whole (Erikson, 1980). In sociology, identity refers to the idea of “social identity” put forth by Henri Tajfel which refers to a person’s sense of identity based on their in-group membership (Tajfel, 1974). If you want to refer to both and the interplay between the two, then you would call that ‘psycho-social identity.’

The idea of an identity within cultural studies adds more complexity to the mix. Stuart Hall introduced the idea that there are two forms of cultural identity: one that unifies individuals within a perceived group by pointing out similarities, and the other aspect which accounts for divergence and complexity amongst individuals within a specific cultural group (Hall, 1990). This theory allows for both the unification of in-groups and also for the individualization of members within that group.

Modern interpretations of identity take into account most or all of these factors and the idea that “Individual identities are complex structures combining inherited features with various group memberships, loyalties, values, belief systems, and fashions. These structures adjust to changing circumstances and so does the concept of identity itself. Elements may be discarded or remixed, new ones added on occasion” (Coulmas, 2019, p. 260). Going forward, when referring to an individuals’ identity, I will generally be referencing this multi-faceted, dynamic concept of identity which accounts for elements of identity coming from both within and without.

We’ve known for a while that music is a vital part of all aspects of identity formation and expression, be it personal, social or cultural. Simon Frith takes it a step further, starting with the idea that music as an experience has a life outside of those who originally wrote and performed the music. He says, “Music seems to be a key to identity because it offers, so intensely, a sense of both self and others, of the subjective in the collective” (Frith, 1996, p. 110). More than other experiences, music enacts both types of cultural identity and psycho-social identity. It can be an experience of your own feelings, or interpreting your own feelings through someone else. At all times it is both deeply communal and personal. Similarly, social media enacts some of those same experiences of the personal and collective identity, albeit in a more ‘virtual’ way.

Social media was a fairly new phenomenon for most people when Myspace started it’s ascent to popularity. Nonexistent was the pervasive idea of a curated online presence or having multiple social media personas that we have now. Teens on Myspace were attempting to develop an “authentic” online presence that would allow people to get to know them, as a result, it could get quite raw and messy. Looking back over some old LiveJournal posts from the same era shows teens using the public internet as a private journal, sharing innermost thoughts and feelings. Reading it feels uncomfortably intimate, much like an episode of the podcast ‘Mortified,’ where adults read their old teenage journals for entertainment. Except there’s no explicit consent from the teens who are now adults — if people read what you wrote, they’re laughing at you, not with you because you aren’t there. Digitalization disconnects content from both creator and context.

Identifying with certain bands and musical trends on Myspace allowed teens and young adults to signal through music to those who were like them in hopes of finding friends and community. People not only expressed themselves through other people’s music, but through posting their own music on Myspace. In 2006, Myspace was not only the most popular music website, but the most-visited internet site in the world (NPR, 2019). Estimates show that between 2003 and 2015, Myspace hosted more than 50 million songs, by over 14 million artists (Krukowski, 2019). Some of these were big name artists like Vampire Weekend, Panic at the Disco, Fleet Foxes, and Lilly Allen, who all built their original fanbases on Myspace, but also lots of small bands who would never put out a proper album — they only existed within the Myspace universe.

Through music, Myspace created what Simon Frith would call a “web of identities.” In a reversal from how we normally think about people creating music as an expression of their identity, he says, “the question we should be asking is not what does popular music reveal about the people who play and use it but how does it create them as a people, as a web of identities?” (Frith, 1996, p. 121). In other words, how does music create collective identity? In the case of Myspace, music was not just an expression of authentic identity (regardless of our teenage feelings), but was creating identity through the creation, curation, and community within musical genres and subcultures. Going further, Frith writes, “Identity, that is to say, comes from the outside not the inside; it is something we put or try on, not something we reveal or discover” (Frith, 1996, p. 122). I disagree slightly. I think identity is the dynamic, constantly shifting collaboration between inside and outside. It’s difficult to say where one even begins and the other ends. Identity is an ecosystem of competing forces. Myspace allowed teens to play with this tension between inside and outside identity through music.

Section 2. Format, deprecation, and archive: Your identity is in an ‘unsupported format’

“As a result of a server migration project, any photos, videos, and audio files you uploaded more than three years ago may no longer be available on or from Myspace. We apologize for the inconvenience.” — Myspace, March 2019

I was listening to a post-punk playlist on Spotify a few months ago, when I heard a song that reminded me of a song I’d heard before, but not in a long time. In 2009, I lived in the basement of a vegan punk house in Seattle, despite not really being either of those things. But I did like to play music, and I’d recently been given an old drum set that took its rightful place in the corner of my basement room. One weekend, a friend who was staying with me and I decided to make a record. So he played guitar and sang ,and I bashed on those drums. We managed to record a 6-song demo in one weekend. We had no aspirations of doing anything with it, but we put it up on Myspace as a record of our record and then promptly forgot about it. Ten years later, I remembered these songs existed and wanted to hear them again, if only for the embarrassment. That’s when I discovered the Myspace Deletion.

Many speculate that the deletion of 50 million songs was no accident but the result of a company not wanting to store them anymore and not wanting to deal with the fall-out of warning people ahead of time. Whatever the reason, it shook the Myspace Generation pretty hard. In an article for Pitchfork, musician Damon Krukowski says of Myspace, “It’s follies like this that have led some to speculate about a ‘digital dark age,’ a period of history that will be largely blank due to lost information — like a giant broken link when the future tries to look back at our time. It’s not hard to imagine, because living and working with digital media is to continually lose access even to one’s own past” (Krukowski, 2019). He argues that the digital age is ‘always in flux’ with media constantly shifting from one format to another– we just get used to digital loss.

But will this always be the case? There are many blank spots in the historical media-archive. Perhaps we’re just being reminded again that entrusting cultural archiving to private companies is not a secure solution. But based on how many CDs, DVDs and hard drives can be found in pawn shops at any given time, I’d guess that while it’s a little sad, maybe we don’t really collectively care that much. “Might it be that the digital era is not only difficult to archive, but anti-historical? That’s what the Myspace incident suggests to me, above all. It’s not just that the files are lost — that’s an experience familiar to anyone working in digital media. It’s that no one was looking for them” (Krukowski, 2019). We’re too busy accelerating towards the future to worry about backwards compatibility.

A little historically short-sighted perhaps, but there might be something else at play here. The reason no one was looking for their old Myspace music (besides lost passwords) relates back to identity. My generation may have lost a good portion of our collective online history, but younger generations might soon wish that someone would come along and delete their old embarrassing, too-personal posts on Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr. Identity isn’t meant to be unchanging forever, but social media can make it difficult to move forward. A New York Times article about social media reflected, “Now that the Internet is more permanent, and more pervasive, it’s hard to avoid the relics of past identities.” (Renner, 2019). They relate this back specifically to trans identities who may not wish to be permanently reminded of previous identities. I can definitely relate to that. We all deserve a personal historical archive, if we want one, but making it public and counting on for-profit companies to be responsible for our personal archive has too many downsides. The Myspace crafting of identity and subsequent deletion could be considered a digital, Heideggerian “ontological death” in which a subject faces the death of their identity, and the possibility of arising anew (Aho, 2016). Facing the death of Myspace and the loss of key pieces of personal, social, and cultural identity might actually force those of the Myspace generation to complete their internet coming-of-age and turn back towards personal archiving and away from corporate, cloud-based archival.

Conclusion
Myspace had a massive impact on the formation of personal, social, and cultural identities for a generation of teens and young adults in the 2000s. The popularity of Myspace was driven by the digitalization of music. As a result, the ubiquitous nature of music on the platform contributed greatly to this formation of identity, giving users a way to create and express their identities through both musical creation and curation. When Myspace decided, without notice, to delete all of the music they had been storing and archiving, it surprised many who realized they had not saved other copies of the music they’d found and stored on Myspace.

This phenomenon is not new to digital media necessarily, but format deprecation happens much faster in the digital world. While it may not be a great loss to some adults to lose embarrassing high school photos and blogs, they may someday realize that they have no evidence of their past identities. This may be distressing, or this may be freeing for them, perhaps a bit of both. What it does make clear is that, entrusting corporations to store cultural archives out of the goodness of their hearts is a risky proposition because after they’ve extracted all the data from it, they may just dump the rest.

Copyright 2020. Brighton Hudak-Kay

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