Remember LimeWire? The peer-to-peer sharing platform was shut down in 2011 under pressure from the music industry. It’s now 2022, and LimeWire is poised for an attempted comeback by jumping on the latest internet bandwagon: NFTs.
The legendary Limewire
LimeWire was king during the era of boy bands and lowrise jeans. Launched in 2000, Limewire was a cultural touchstone and an iconic online presence to a whole group of millennials. It became the world’s biggest go-to hub for cool kids to download and share music, movies, and TV shows free of charge over the internet, attracting 50 million monthly users at its peak popularity in the mid-2000s.
Users amassed vast collections of pop culture—often illegally, as the platform earned a reputation as one of the early pioneers of the internet piracy boom. Blaming piracy as one of the main reasons for declining music sales, record companies sued LimeWire in 2006.
LimeWire went belly up in 2010 after a federal judge ruled to shut down the business over copyright infringement. Major record companies then settled out of court with LimeWire’s CEO at the time, Mark Gorton, for $105 million.
Yet the controversy didn’t seem to make LimeWire any less beloved. Even today, you can find Twitter conversations in which people wax nostalgic about the LimeWire name.
The play for LimeWire
This nostalgic connection to LimeWire led two serial entrepreneurs to buy the rights to the defunct platform, with hopes to capitalize on the next generation of cultural phenomena: the world of Web3.
The buyers, Julian and Paul Zehetmayr, two brothers from Austria, aspire to relaunch LimeWire as a cryptosphere marketplace, selling NFTs linked to music, artwork, and content.
“Everybody connects [LimeWire] with music and we’re launching initially a very music-focused marketplace, so the brand was really the perfect fit for that with its legacy,” said Julian Zehetmayr.
LimeWire and NFTs
LimeWire said it will partner with the music industry and the artists, who can sell pre-release music, unreleased demos, graphical artwork, exclusive live versions, as well as digital merchandise and backstage content.
In May, LimeWire will be relaunching as a “mainstream-ready, digital collectibles marketplace for art and entertainment, initially focusing on music.” Its backers believe that it will be a place for artists and fans to create and sell digital trinkets without the “technical hurdles of the current NFT landscape.”
And it somehow seems fitting. Whereas LimeWire was on the frontier of the Web 2.0 economy in its heyday, it now has a chance to ride the evolution of internet culture via a new Web3 platform.
Online nostalgia and crypto
LimeWire is the latest in a string of tech nostalgia reboots, in which dusty brands reinvent themselves to survive in today’s digital universe. There have been several attempts to remake Myspace, as well as the birth of NeoCities, a successor to GeoCities. However, very few of those have found staying power.
It’s also not the first to move to crypto: In 2018, rival internet pirate BitTorrent was acquired by blockchain startup Tron, which is owned by crypto millionaire Justin Sun. And in December, RadioShack revealed it would become a forum to trade cryptocurrencies.
Looking ahead
LimeWire is hoping to partner with a raft of high-profile musicians in the hope of spreading the word about LimeWire’s resurrection. It plans to give up to 90% of the revenue to the artists in the hope of getting a million willing buyers signed up before the first year is done.
“LimeWire kind of laid the foundation for music streaming…it’s a piece of internet legacy and we are thankful that we can turn it around at something for the music industry,” Zehetmayr said.
