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The Myspace Music Dragon Hoard is a recovered archive of 490,273 songs from 120,000 artists that were originally uploaded to Myspace Music. You can listen to it through Mydora, a continuous streaming player built by Kyle Drake. Mydora lets you play the archive as a stream and filter it by genre. It is a historical recovery project, not a complete or restored version of Myspace Music — the archive represents only a tiny fraction of the tens of millions of songs that were destroyed, many of which had no copies and are lost forever.

What the Dragon Hoard actually contains

The archive is based on recovered data called the Dragon Hoard, supplemented with additional metadata — most notably locations and genres — from a separate scan of Myspace conducted in 2009.

The genre list in Mydora is extensive and includes both broad and niche categories, for example:

• Large genres: Pop (58,329), Hip Hop (55,815), Alternative (47,577), Indie (47,185), Metal (36,043), Punk (33,108), Rap (35,438)
• Electronic and experimental: Electronica (33,994), Experimental (34,023), Electro (20,514), IDM (2,545), Breakcore (644)
• Smaller or regional categories: Dutch pop (86), French pop (98), K-POP (428), Chinese pop (479), J-POP (828)

These counts come directly from Mydora's genre index, so they also give you a sense of what you'll find before you start filtering.

Why this archive matters

Myspace was once a central place for independent and emerging musicians to host their music. When the platform's music data was lost, a huge amount of material disappeared — much of it with no other copy. The Dragon Hoard preserves a small but meaningful slice of that history.

As Mydora's own description puts it, the project "tells the story of this amazing music" and aims to give listeners both entertainment and an understanding of how valuable the collection was. In other words, this is as much a preservation effort as it is a listening tool.

How to listen with Mydora

Mydora is a continuous streaming player, so the basic flow is simple:

1. Open Mydora at mydora.restorativland.org.
2. Start playing. The player streams from the archive continuously rather than requiring you to pick a single track first.
3. Filter by genre if you want direction. Use the genre list to narrow the stream — for example, choose Emo, Shoegaze-adjacent categories like Dream Pop if listed, or larger buckets like Indie or Punk.
4. Let it run. Because it's a continuous player, you can leave it on and hear a broad cross-section of the archive.

What to expect

• You won't get a full Myspace library. Only a fraction of the original music survived, so many artists and songs you remember may not be present.
• Metadata is uneven. Genres and locations come from a separate 2009 scan, so tags may not always match what you'd expect for a given track.
• It's a stream, not an on-demand catalog. The experience is closer to a themed radio station than a search-and-play service.

Background and source

Mydora was developed by Kyle Drake, and the source code is available publicly. More context about the project is linked from the site itself. If you want to understand where the data came from or how the player works, those links are the place to start.

The short version

If you want to hear a piece of lost internet music history, Mydora is the way in: open the site, hit play, and optionally filter by genre. Just go in knowing that the Dragon Hoard is a partial recovery — 490,273 songs out of tens of millions — and that its value lies in what it preserves, not in completeness.

GeoCities was a free web hosting service that let ordinary people build personal homepages, grouped into themed "neighborhoods" like SiliconValley and Area51. Launched in the mid-1990s and shut down in 2009, it hosted millions of hand-made pages before social platforms made publishing someone else's feed the default. The modern revival looks different: sites like InternetTiles sell small permanent plots on a shared pixel map where you upload art and link your site. If you want the community and full-page freedom of GeoCities, a tile grid won't replace it — but it's a cheap, low-effort homage to the same idea that a personal corner of the web is worth owning.

What GeoCities actually was

GeoCities gave users free space to build a homepage, usually with a simple editor or hand-written HTML. Pages were organized into neighborhoods — themed directories such as SiliconValley (tech), Area51 (sci-fi and paranormal), and others — so your page sat alongside strangers with similar interests rather than in an algorithmic feed.

The defining traits:

• You owned the page. Visitors came to your URL, not to a profile inside someone else's app.
• It was visibly personal. Under-construction GIFs, guestbooks, hit counters, tiled backgrounds, and webrings were standard.
• Community was built in. Neighborhoods and webrings created discovery through links, not recommendations.

Yahoo acquired GeoCities in 1999. In 2009, Yahoo shut the service down, and a large share of those user pages disappeared — a loss that later became a rallying point for web-preservation projects.

Why the pixel-grid revival feels related

Modern pixel grids borrow the emotional core of GeoCities — a small, self-owned spot on the web — while dropping almost everything else.

On InternetTiles, the model is a 200×200 map of the internet. Each tile is a coordinate you claim, then fill with art (including animated GIFs) and a link to your site. The page shows the map with zoom and pan controls, a running count of claimed tiles, and a leaderboard. At the time of writing, the site reports 3,140 tiles claimed, or 7.85% of the map, with tiered pricing that increases as the map fills.

The pitch — "your little piece of the internet" — is deliberately nostalgic. It echoes the Million Dollar Homepage, which sold pixels on a single page, and through that lineage it also nods to the GeoCities era of amateur, link-driven web publishing.

Where the comparison holds

• A permanent personal plot. You claim a coordinate and it stays on the grid.
• Self-expression over algorithm. What you upload is the content; there's no feed ranking it.
• Link-first discovery. Clicking a claimed tile takes you to that owner's site, the way webring links once moved you between personal pages.

Where it breaks down

If what you miss is writing pages and joining a neighborhood, a tile is a memento, not a replacement. If what you miss is simply having a marker on the open web, it fits.

How to take part today

Treat a tile as a small homage rather than a homepage. The general flow:

1. Open the map and zoom or pan to find an empty coordinate.
2. Pick a block shape. InternetTiles offers 1×1 up to 5×5; a 1×1 tile is listed at $2, and the page notes tiered pricing that rises as more of the map is claimed.
3. Upload your art — a static image or an animated GIF.
4. Link your site so clicking the tile sends visitors there.
5. Confirm and manage it through the "Manage my tiles" option.

Expect the tile to be a visual signpost, not a traffic engine. Its value is the same thing that made GeoCities matter: a small, deliberate piece of the web that you put there yourself.