LimeWire, the long-defunct file-sharing site that was once a hotspot for illegal MP3 downloads with incorrect tags, has resurfaced as an NFT marketplace. According to Bloomberg, two Austrian entrepreneurs have spent the previous two years buying the LimeWire brand and will relaunch it in May as a new platform. LimeWire was shut down at the end of 2010 after a lawsuit brought by a group of record labels held the firm guilty for copyright infringement.
Despite having no ties to the former LimeWire team other than the name, the new LimeWire CEOs, who are brothers, are hopeful that their fondness for the once-popular P2P network would give them an advantage in the NFT rat race. “It’s a iconic name.” Even today, hundreds of people on Twitter are nostalgic about the name,” Julian Zehetmayr, one of the company’s CEOs, told Bloomberg. “Everybody connects it 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.”
The other CEO, Paul Zehetmayr, said: “After about 12 years of the platform being down, all the controversy that might have been in the past with the music industry has turned into nostalgia.”
The new LimeWire will serve as a market for buying and selling music-related non-fungible tokens, with users having the choice of paying in US dollars or using bitcoin to do so. So far, ten “really big mainstream” musicians have agreed to sell exclusive NFTs on the LimeWire marketplace, according to the CEOs. (Wu-Tang Clan and H.E.R., who have members of their management teams on the LimeWire advisory board, might be in the mix.)
LimeWire will be available in May.