Limewire (which still exists) buys Fyre Festival (which has never done) on eBay

Mix two internet key stones together and what do you get? We will discover it. Limewire, the Peer-to-Peer file sharing network, announced that it won the rights of the Fyre Festival brand during an auction. The company said that it did not intend to use the brand for a music festival, but rather bought the name and resemblance mainly for the same.

Limewire declared in a press release that he planned to “reveal a redesigned vision of Fyre – a vision that extends beyond the digital field and exploits real experiences, a community and a surprise.” He did not offer much for more details, although he has set up a waiting list so that the first adopters … Anyway. In the meantime, the company mainly goes for the sale of Ham Selling Fyre Merch.

This is probably enough for the company to reveal a profit on what it has paid for the Fyre Festival brand. According to the list of eBay auctions, the final sale price was $ 245,300, which confirmed Limewire in Gizmodo by e-mail. For this prize, Limewire won the name of the Fyre Festival, its brands and its registered intellectual property, its social media accounts and its domain names.

The auction was created by Billy McFarland, the founder of Fyre Festival, who is still not being restored to those who were scammed by the first failed festival. The auction is technically the first thing McFarland has seen until the banner of Fyre, since the first festival was a disaster and that the second promised festival has died. Despite this, McFarland has apparently been quite disappointed with the final figure. During a live flow counting until the final offer, McFarland said: “Shit. It fears, it’s so low.”

Limewire said he would not comment directly on McFarland’s expectations. “But I can say that we are very satisfied with the agreement, which includes the purchase price but also the process – which was treated very professionally by both sides,” Marcus Feistl, chief of Limewire, told Gizmodo.

Feistl has also confirmed that McFarland “will not be involved” in the Fyre Limewire version. “We are in touch with him and had a very professional exchange during the transaction process. But the new Fyre will be managed by a whole new team,” he said. “We are actually convinced that this is a necessary step for a new start for the brand.”

This should probably not be a shock that the Limewire team won the Fyre Festival brand (although it apparently had some competition from the Ryan Reynolds Creation Agency, maximum effort). The current iteration of Limewire has no connection with the team that initially launched the peer network that shaped music and file sharing in the 2000s. Instead, it is led by the Paul and Julian Zehetmayr brothers, who bought the Limewire brand and launched a NFT market in 2022. More recently, they pivoted a musical platform propelled by AI. So it makes everything less fun.