Mansi Manoj & Feeling Data
This touch-screen visualization explores the disappearance, or “death,” of music-related websites. Each dot represents a website: active sites float within a rotating sphere, while those that have vanished fall into a puddle below.
Of the roughly 5,600 music-related websites in the Scotland on the Internet archive, almost half no longer exist on the live web. The data reveals patterns of loss, with over 56% of site decay in 2024.
Earlier peaks coincide with major cultural and technological shifts, including the collapse of MySpace blogs in 2008, the decline of MP3 sites with the rise of streaming in 2013, and domain losses around the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020. Grassroots and genre-based sites tend to disappear sooner and more often than institutional ones. Subdomains such as Reading, Music: Teaching, and Traditional/Folk appear especially vulnerable, highlighting areas of digital heritage at high risk of disappearance.
Overall, the patterns suggest a structured rather than random loss, shaped by broader cultural and infrastructural forces across the music web.