Lost on MySpace, found on hard drives.

What the platforms took

In 2018, MySpace announced that a server migration had lost "all music, photos, and videos" uploaded before 2016. For a generation of producers (many of them amateurs who had treated MySpace as their primary distribution), this was a catastrophe, quietly absorbed. Vanessa's public profile at myspace.com/vanessathemusician was effectively emptied.

LiveJournal's decay was slower but similar. Her journal posts from those years survive only in scattered fragments. The Bliss Corporation Forum where she posted early tracks largely went quiet by the late 2000s and the hosted audio with it. By the late 2010s, for someone Googling her name, there was essentially nothing to find.

What friends kept

What hadn't been deleted was what she had actually given to people. She was prolific with CDs, and CD-burner culture in the early 2000s meant that if someone liked you, they got a disc with your songs on it. Those discs were scattered across living rooms and closets and old storage boxes for twenty years.

The archive you're reading started with 51 tracks recovered from Todd Hertzelle's own collection in December 2025. In January 2026, John Alan Fessel, a friend of hers from those years who had collaborated with her on lyrics, began sending mp3s one batch at a time: short experimental pieces, demos, a track labeled only "Track 15" from a CD he burned in 2006. By early February the archive was up to 60 tracks.

On March 4, 2026, Amanda Miller plugged in a USB drive she had been deliberately keeping safe for almost twenty years and emailed over thirty mp3s. Around the time of Vanessa's illness in 2007, Amanda had quietly set out to grab as many of her songs as she could, not for any specific purpose, just so that something would survive. A substantial part of what's in this archive, including full albums and higher-quality masters of tracks that otherwise only existed in lower bitrates, is here because of that one decision. The archive jumped from 60 to its current 86 in a single afternoon.

This is my favorite song of hers. When I need a good pick-me-up, I still put it on repeat. Amanda Miller · on Time Goes By

How most of this survived

Most of what's here survived because people held onto it, in small, personal ways. A copy of a CD kept in a sleeve. A folder on a laptop. Amanda's USB drive. The disc John burned in 2006. In 2007, the internet was still young enough that "saving" a file meant something physical, and Vanessa was generous enough with her music that a lot of people had copies to save. That's how she's still here to listen to.

A substantial portion of her catalogue is almost certainly still out there too, on a laptop somebody upgraded from, a backup drive in a closet, a CD tucked into a yearbook or a move-out box. The Still searching page lists 69 titles we know existed but haven't found audio for. If you knew her and kept anything, a folder, a disc, a single file you don't remember downloading, please reach out. Nothing is too small.

What we're doing with what's back

The working rule is preservation, not curation. Every track we recover goes on the site whether it's a finished record, a thirty-second sketch, or a demo with a rough vocal. Her sketches are worth hearing as sketches; the rough vocals are her voice, and there isn't going to be more of it. Everything is downloadable. The full collection is also mirrored at archive.org as a belt-and-suspenders backup.

If the archive grew by twenty-five tracks in a single afternoon when one person checked an old drive, it stands to reason there are other afternoons waiting.