We have been posting music videos since 2009. Somewhere along the way the archive got big enough to be a question instead of a blog: if a video blog runs long enough, how much of it is still there?
So we checked. Every embed, every post, all the way back. The answer is more interesting than “some links break,” because the breakage isn’t random. The internet has a memory, and it is forgetting on a schedule.
The stat, if you’re here to steal it: of the 1,357 YouTube music videos we’ve embedded since 2009, 1.6% are now dead — but that average lies. Link rot is savagely uneven by age: 33% of our 2009 posts and 39% of our 2010 posts now have a dead video, versus 0% across 2011–2016 and 0.1% for 2026. The oldest, biggest, most-licensed stuff rots first.
The headline number is a lie of averages
We scanned 1,690 posts holding 1,357 unique videos. 26 of those videos are dead — pulled, privatized, terminated, or vanished into the gray “this video is no longer available” box. That kills 21 of the 1,312 posts that ever carried an embed: a 1.6% death rate.
Sounds fine. Reassuring, even. The internet remembers 98.4% of what we showed it.
Except that average is hiding the actual story, the way an average always does. Split it by year and the floor drops out:
| Year | Posts w/ video | Dead | Death rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009 | 12 | 4 | 33.3% |
| 2010 | 41 | 16 | 39.0% |
| 2011 | 32 | 0 | 0% |
| 2012 | 14 | 0 | 0% |
| 2013–2016 | 21 | 0 | 0% |
| 2026 | 1,192 | 1 | 0.1% |
Read that again. The stuff we posted last month is basically immortal — one dead link out of nearly twelve hundred. The stuff we posted at the founding, when this was a blog about an EDM scene that hadn’t blown up yet, is a third to forty percent gone. Not degraded. Gone.
That gap is the report. Link rot doesn’t tick along at a steady 1.6%. It compounds with age, and it has a taste.
What dies first
Look at which posts went dark and a pattern shows up immediately. The 2009–2010 graveyard is wall-to-wall with the biggest names of the moment: Lady Gaga (four separate posts, all dead), Swedish House Mafia, deadmau5, Pryda, Afrojack, Tiësto remixes, Sebastien Leger. The exact instant dance music went mainstream is the most rotted year in our entire history.
None of that is chance. The bigger and more commercial the moment, the more hands eventually reach for the takedown button — labels consolidating rights, official channels replacing fan uploads, artists scrubbing the messy early footage, management cleaning house. The amateur upload of a 2010 Swedish House Mafia Ibiza clip was always going to lose a fight with a record label. The obscure stuff from 2011? Nobody important enough to delete it ever noticed it. So it survives.
The internet doesn’t preserve what mattered most. It preserves what mattered least. Cultural importance is a risk factor.
The one that hurts
For the full bleak-comedy effect: one of the dead posts from 2010 is titled “Coldplay Sucks, But Lady Gaga doesn’t.” Our own thesis statement, the entire reason this site has the name it has, set to a Lady Gaga video — and the video is dead. The argument outlived its evidence. There is no neater illustration of the whole problem: the take is permanent, the proof rotted off.
Why this isn’t just our problem
Every “best of 2010” listicle, every nostalgic Reddit thread, every Wikipedia citation pointing at a YouTube embed from that era is sitting on the same fault line we are. Most of them just haven’t run the check. The web treats a 15-year-old link and a 15-minute-old link as identically trustworthy — same blue underline, same confident embed — right up until you click and find the hole. We only know our 2009–2010 numbers because we own the archive and went looking. Multiply that across a decade of music blogs, many of which are themselves already dead, and the “permanent record” of an entire genre’s birth is quietly turning into Swiss cheese.
What we’re doing about it
We’re not going to pretend we can fix YouTube. But we can stop pretending nothing’s wrong. The same script that produced these numbers (dead-embed-check.js) now runs against the archive on a schedule, flags newly-dead embeds, and lets us patch a dead post — swap in a surviving upload, or mark it honestly as a casualty instead of serving you a broken black box. An archive that watches itself rot and tells the truth about it is the most we can promise. It’s more than most of the internet does.
Methodology (for the skeptics and the press)
Every published post was parsed for YouTube embed IDs; each unique ID was checked against YouTube’s oEmbed endpoint, which returns a clean signal for removed/private/terminated videos. “Dead” = the video no longer resolves to playable content. Counts are posts and unique videos, not raw embeds (a few tracks were posted twice). Snapshot date: 2026-06-08, n = 1,357 unique videos across 1,690 posts. Raw data and the checker are open in our repo — if you want to run the same audit on your own archive, the numbers are reproducible, and we’d genuinely like to know whether your founding era rotted as hard as ours did.
Got an archive worth checking, or writing about how the internet forgets? The data’s open and we’ll happily compare notes — find us on Bluesky.