LimeWire, the so-called “music platform” that introduced many people of a certain age to piracy, is reportedly being reincarnated as a non-fungible token (NFT) marketplace.
Bloomberg reports that Austrian “brothers Paul and Julian Zehetmayr are hoping to use LimeWire’s early-2000s fame to attract users to their new cryptosphere platform, with the two spending most of last year steadily acquiring the various parts of LimeWire’s branding.”
Saying that LimeWire is an interesting brand to revive would be an understatement. It did make it easy for people to pirate music in the early aughts, sure, but those people weren’t metaphorically sailing the black seas. They were drinking from a cesspool with a few drops of potable water.
LimeWire users were at the mercy of whoever uploaded a given file. Someone looking for “Lips of an Angel” by Hinder, for example, might download “lips_of_an_angel.mp3” only to discover the file was actually malware or hardcore porn. (Or so I’ve heard from… my cousin in Canada.)
Everything about that sentence—from the Hinder reference to the roughly equal probability of getting a legitimate file, a snippet of porn, or malware—ought to paint a picture of what people who’ve actually used LimeWire think of whenever someone references the platform.
But now it’s coming back as an NFT marketplace, because apparently the Zehetmayr brothers have a very different understanding of the LimeWire brand, as Julian told Bloomberg: “It’s a very iconic name. Even if you look on Twitter today, there’s hundreds of people still being nostalgic about the name. 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.”
This 2019 profile of the Zehetmayr brothers tells us that Julian was 7 years old when LimeWire first launched and 17 when it finally bit the dust a decade later. Paul is Julian’s younger brother, so the duo perhaps never experienced the thrill of downloading Jennifer Lopez’s “I’m Real (Remix) ft. Ja Rule” without tipping off their ISP or the RIAA.
So, yeah. LimeWire is coming back with what Bloomberg describes as “support for buying and trading music-related nonfungible tokens, such as exclusive songs, merchandise, graphical artworks and experiences like backstage content.” We may actually have reached peak crypto.
