Mix two internet touchstones together and what do you get? We’re going to find out. LimeWire, the peer-to-peer file-sharing network, announced that it won the rights to the Fyre Festival brand in an auction. The company indicated it has no plans to use the branding for a music festival, but rather bought up the name and likeness mostly for the memes.
LimeWire said in a press release that it plans to “unveil a reimagined vision for Fyre — one that expands beyond the digital realm and taps into real-world experiences, community, and surprise.” It didn’t offer much for details, though it did set up a waitlist for early adopters to…whatever it is. In the meantime, the company is mostly just going ham selling Fyre merch.
That alone is probably enough for the company to turn a profit on what it paid for the Fyre Festival branding. According to the eBay auction listing, the final sale price was $245,300, which LimeWire confirmed to Gizmodo via email. For that price, LimeWire landed the Fyre Festival name, its registered trademarks and intellectual property, social media accounts, and domain names.
The auction was set up by Billy McFarland, the founder of Fyre Festival, who is still on the hook for $26 million in restitution to those who got scammed out of money by the first failed festival. The auction is technically the first thing that McFarland has seen through to fruition under the Fyre banner, considering the first festival was a disaster and the promised second festival fizzled out. Despite that, McFarland was apparently pretty disappointed in the final figure. During a live stream counting down to the final bid, McFarland said, “Damn. This sucks, it’s so low.”
LimeWire said it wouldn’t comment directly on McFarland’s expectations. “But I can say that we’re quite happy with the deal, which includes the purchase price but also the process—which was handled very professionally by both sides,” Marcus Feistl, Chief Operating Officer at LimeWire, told Gizmodo.
Feistl also confirmed that McFarland “will not be involved” in LimeWire’s version of Fyre. “We’re in contact with him and had a very professional exchange during the transactional process. But the new Fyre will be managed by an entirely new team,” he said. “We’re actually convinced that this is a necessary step for a fresh start for the brand.”
It probably shouldn’t come as a shock that the LimeWire team snagged Fyre Festival’s branding (though apparently they did have some competition from Ryan Reynolds’ creative agency, Maximum Effort). The current iteration of LimeWire has no ties to the team that originally launched the peer-to-peer network that shaped music and file sharing in the 2000s. Instead, it’s run by brothers Paul and Julian Zehetmayr, who bought up the LimeWire branding and launched an NFT marketplace in 2022. Most recently, they pivoted to an AI-powered music platform. So, that kinda makes the whole thing less fun.
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