Lil B’s 404-track Free Music Myspace collection is now streaming

Lil B, one of the most transformational artists of the internet era, worked his way into rap's pantheon through Myspace. His polarizing rap style and “BasedGod” mythology were inescapable thanks in part to the sheer volume of releases – hundreds of songs spanning several different profiles. That era of history was available to download in 2011 as the 676-song mixtape Free Music: The Complete Myspace Collection. Now the majority of those songs are available to stream. On Wednesday, Lil B uploaded 404 of the Myspace tracks to streaming platforms as four 101-track volumes titled Free Music: The Complete Myspace Collection. Listen to Volume 1 below on Apple Music.

It’s quite a relief that Lil B’s Myspace era wasn’t among the 12 years of music lost – about 50 million songs – after a botched “server migration.” Perhaps some of the songs were among the 500,000 subsequently recovered by the Internet Archive. Lil B may want to think about preserving the Based Freestyle mixtape, released in 2012 with a 848-song tracklist including some MySpace tunes.