mydora.restorativland.org

What is Mydora?

Mydora is a continuous streaming music player built around the Myspace Dragon Hoard, an archive of 490,273 recovered songs from roughly 120,000 artists. Rather than an on-demand catalog, it plays continuously, and you can steer what you hear by genre.

What it actually is

The archive comes from recovered Myspace Music data, with added metadata — most notably artist locations and genres — drawn from a separate 2009 scan of Myspace. The site's own framing is that this collection is a small surviving slice of the tens of millions of songs that were deleted, many with no copies left. Mydora was developed by Kyle Drake.

What you can do with it

• Press play and let it run as a background stream.
• Filter by genre before or during listening.
• Browse a long genre list with counts, so you can see where the depth is.

The genre counts are the most useful practical feature. Hip Hop (55,815), Pop (58,329), Alternative (47,577), Indie (47,185), Metal (36,043), Rap (35,438), Punk (33,108), Electronica (33,994), Experimental (34,023), and Acoustic (32,511) are the big pools. Narrower tags like Dutch pop (86), French pop (98), Chinese pop (479), K-POP (428), and Idol (529) are thin — expect repetition or a short session if you start there.

Who it suits

• Someone curious about mid-2000s Myspace-era music as a cultural artifact.
• A listener who wants a lean-back stream rather than picking specific tracks.
• Anyone researching genre distribution or obscure regional scenes from that period.

It is a poor fit if you want to search for a specific song by name, build playlists, or expect polished audio and complete artist pages. Treat it as a window into a partially lost collection, not a modern streaming service.

A practical next step

Pick one broad genre and one narrow one, listen to each for ten minutes, and compare. That quickly shows whether Mydora works better for you as ambient discovery or as targeted digging. For background on the wider Myspace music loss, the Internet Archive at Internet Archive is a useful companion for related preservation projects.

How can I find music from a specific Myspace artist in the Dragon Hoard archive?

You can find a specific artist's music in the Dragon Hoard archive through Mydora, but the player is built for continuous browsing more than for precise lookup. Mydora streams the recovered collection and offers a genre filter, so the most reliable path is to start from the genre closest to the artist you have in mind, then listen through until you hit them.

The archive holds roughly 490,000 songs from about 120,000 artists, which sounds large until you remember it is described as a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of Myspace tracks that were lost. That mismatch is the key practical point: many artists from Myspace's peak years are simply not in this dataset, and no search strategy will surface what was never recovered.

A workable approach

1. Pick the artist's most likely genre from the list. The counts give you a sense of where the odds are better. Hip Hop (about 55,800), Pop (about 58,300), Indie (about 47,200), Alternative (about 47,600) and Metal (about 36,000) are the deepest pools; niche tags like Dutch pop (86), French pop (98) or K-POP (428) are thin enough to scan quickly.
2. If the artist straddled genres, try more than one. A band tagged "Emo" on Myspace might sit under Punk, Alternative or Hardcore here.
3. Use the history and now-playing display to keep track of what has played, so you can retrace a find.
4. Treat genre as the primary filter and accept that artist-level search may not be supported by the interface as described.

What to expect

Mydora is a listening experience, not a database query tool. If your goal is to verify whether one specific band survived, the honest answer is that you may have to audition a genre stream and hope. If your goal is to explore a scene — say, the 2000s screamo or electro underground — the genre counts make it easy to drop into a relevant pool and let it run.

As a next step, decide which of the two goals you actually have. For discovery, open the genre list and start with a mid-sized tag like Emo, Grunge or 2-step, where the count is small enough to feel navigable. For a specific artist, check whether they had a genre tag you can recall, then work through that stream in a few sittings rather than expecting an instant match.

What genres are available to filter in Mydora, and how do I use them?

Mydora lets you filter its Myspace Dragon Hoard archive by genre, and the genre list is unusually broad and granular. It mixes everyday categories with very specific subgenres, regional pop, and scene labels.

H3 What you can filter by

The list includes, among many others:

• Broad popular genres: Pop, Rock (via subgenres like Classic Rock and Punk), Hip Hop, R&B, Country, Jazz, Metal, Reggae, Latin, Folk, Blues, Gospel, Christian.
• Electronic and dance: House, Electro, Electronica, Drum & Bass, Breakbeat, Breakcore, Garage, Grime, Hard House, Happy Hardcore, Jungle, IDM, Down-tempo, Disco House, Progrsv House, Ghettotech, Club.
• Heavier and punk-adjacent: Metal, Death Metal, Black Metal, Grindcore, Hardcore, Punk, Pop Punk, Post punk, Emo, Emotronic, Grunge, Glam, Gothic, Industrial, Psychobilly.
• Experimental and niche: Experimental, Ambient, Minimalist, Acousmatic, Electroacoustic, Live Electronics, Concrete, Fusion, Nu-Jazz, Neo-soul, IDM.
• Regional and language-specific pop: J-POP, K-POP, Chinese pop, Dutch pop, French pop, German pop, Italian pop, Japanese Classic Music.
• Others: Acoustic, Americana, Bluegrass, Bossa Nova, Celtic, Comedy, Flamenco, Hawaiian, Healing & EasyListening, Jam Band, Lounge, Lyrical, Melodramatic Popular Song, New Wave, Powerpop, Progressive, Psychedelic, Reggaeton, Regional, Other.

H3 How to use the filter

Open the Genres list, pick a genre, and Mydora plays a continuous stream from that slice of the archive. The numbers next to each genre show how many songs fall into it, so you can judge whether a filter gives you a long session or a short one. Larger counts, such as Hip Hop, Pop, Alternative and Indie, mean hours of continuous listening; smaller counts, such as Dutch pop or K-POP, are better for a focused browse. If you want to move between styles, switch genres rather than treating the stream as a fixed playlist.

A practical starting point: choose one broad genre for background listening, then one narrow subgenre when you want to hear a specific scene. Pair it with the History view if you want to find something you heard earlier, since a continuous stream makes it easy to lose track of a track you liked.

Does Mydora let me listen to songs continuously without creating a playlist?

Yes. Mydora is built as a continuous streaming player, so playback keeps going without you assembling a queue first. You press play and it streams through the archive, drawing on 490,273 recovered songs from roughly 120,000 artists. There is no playlist-building step in the description; the default experience is lean-back listening.

The trade-off is control. You steer the stream with filters rather than a hand-picked sequence, and genre is the main lever: Hip Hop (55,815), Pop (58,329), Alternative (47,577), Indie (47,185), Metal (36,043), Punk (33,108), Experimental (34,023) and Electronica (33,994) are among the larger buckets, while narrow tags such as Dutch pop (86), French pop (98), Chinese pop (479) and K-POP (428) give you a much tighter, more specialised run. Expect the catalogue to be uneven in era and audio quality, since it comes from recovered Myspace data rather than a curated commercial library.

A practical way to use it: pick one broad genre for background listening, then switch to a small niche tag when you want a focused session. If you need a specific running order or exact repeats, a conventional player with playlists will suit you better.

For related listening, Internet Archive holds independent audio collections, and Bandcamp is where many artists from this era now host their own catalogues.

How much of Myspace's original music collection was saved in the Dragon Hoard?

About 490,273 songs from roughly 120,000 artists — described on the site as a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of tracks that were lost when Myspace Music was wiped. So the honest answer is: a very small slice, not a significant share of the original collection. Many of the destroyed songs reportedly had no copies anywhere and are gone permanently.

A few practical implications:

• It's a sample, not an archive of the era. If you're looking for a specific band you remember from Myspace, expect to find nothing most of the time.
• Genre browsing is the realistic way in. The player organizes the collection by genre with counts (for example, Hip Hop around 55,800, Punk around 33,100, Experimental around 34,000, Classical around 7,400, and much smaller categories like Dutch pop at 86). That makes it better for wandering than for targeted searching.
• Small genres are oddly useful. With only a few hundred tracks in categories like K-POP or Dutch pop, you can actually hear a whole niche rather than skim it.

If you want to explore it, try Mydora and start with a genre whose count is in the low thousands — large enough to keep playing, small enough that you'll notice what's distinctive. If you're researching the Myspace era rather than just listening, treat the collection as illustrative evidence and pair it with written histories of the platform, since the missing majority shapes any conclusion you'd draw from it.

Can I access the source code or contribute to the Mydora project?

Yes. Mydora is an open-source project by Kyle Drake, and the page states the source code is available (linked from the player itself). So you can read the code, run it yourself, and contribute via the project's repository.

H3 What that means in practice

• Access: The player's own "what is this?" panel points to the source repository, so the starting point is the Mydora site rather than a separate developer portal.
• Contribution: Because the code is public, typical routes are bug reports, fixes, metadata corrections, and interface improvements. Check the repository's issues/contributing notes before opening a pull request, since maintainers of archival projects often have specific rules about how data is handled.
• Running it locally: Expect to deal with a large dataset (490,273 songs across roughly 120,000 artists), so a local setup is more of a data-and-storage task than a quick clone-and-run.

H3 Who this suits

• Curious listeners: Just use the player at Mydora; no coding needed.
• Developers: Good fit if you're interested in streaming players, archive metadata, or genre filtering at scale.
• Music historians and researchers: The genre list (from a 2009 Myspace scan) is itself a useful artifact — Hip Hop, Pop, Alternative, Indie and Metal each have tens of thousands of tracks, while niches like Dutch pop (86) or French pop (98) are barely represented.

H3 A practical next step Open Mydora, click through to the source link, and read the repository's README and open issues before writing code. If your interest is the music rather than the software, browse by genre first — the counts give you a realistic sense of what survived versus what the page notes is permanently lost. For general background on the era's music culture, Myspace is the original platform, though its old music library is not what it once was.