LimeWire has acquired the infamous Fyre Festival brand – find out more below.
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In July, Fyre founder Billy McFarland announced that the Fyre Festival brand and all of its IPs had been sold to a bidder on eBay for just under a quarter of a million dollars. McFarland shared at the time that he was working on a “tech platform designed to capture and power the value behind every view online,” and told followers that it’s “coming soon”.
Now, the bidder that purchased Fyre on eBay has been revealed as the revived early 2000s pirating platform, LimeWire. LimeWire initially launched in 2000 as an illegal peer-to-peer file-sharing and pirating platform. It was ultimately shut down, but resurfaced in 2022 as a crypto company.
LimeWire’s purchase of Fyre was confirmed in a press released per Deadline, which reads: “Once synonymous with disruption in their own very different ways, LimeWire and Fyre are now poised to begin an entirely new chapter – one grounded in technology, transparency, and a sense of humour.”
LimeWire CEO Julian Zehetmayr saying: “LimeWire’s acquisition is not about repeating past mistakes – it’s about saving one of the internet’s most infamous cultural memes from extinction and turning it into something new. Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history.”
Zehetmayr also clarified that “we’re not bringing the festival back – we’re bringing the brand and the meme back to life. This time with real experiences, and without the cheese sandwiches.”
The tech company’s COO Marcus Feistl added: “Fyre became a symbol of everything that can go wrong. Now it’s our chance to show what happens when you pair cultural relevance with real execution.”
Additionally, it is reported that actor Ryan Reynolds‘ creative agency Maximum Effort also made a bid for the Fyre brand, though the amount it offered remains disclosed. Reynolds said of LimeWire’s winning bid in a statement, per Rolling Stone: “Congrats to LimeWire for their winning bid for Fyre Fest. I look forward to attending their first event but will be bringing my own palette of water.”
The original Fyre Festival was first developed by McFarland eight years ago, and was planned to run over two weekends on a private beach in the Bahamas. That edition in 2017 was reportedly set to include performances from Blink-182, Major Lazer, Disclosure, Migos, Pusha T, Tyga and more.
It made headlines when it was revealed to be fraudulent, with punters arriving on the scene and facing inadequate conditions and a lack of food and water. The ordeal was then captured in the now-iconic Netflix documentary FYRE.
McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018 for defrauding investors and was released after just four years in 2022. Fyre Fest 2 was originally set to run between May 30 and June 2 on an island in Mexico, before the tourism board and local officials claimed that no such festival existed.
Before it was cancelled, the second edition of Fyre Fest saw tickets sell for between $1,400 and $25,000 (£1,081-£19,305), while premium packages were priced as high as $1.1million (£850,000). Ahead of the planned second instalment, former Fyre Festival investor Andy King warned of “a lot of red flags” over the event’s planned reboot. In May, it was revealed that the Fyre Festival brand was looking to launch a hotel experience later this year, marketed as a Caribbean getaway in Honduras in September.