LimeWire buys financially troubled Fyre Festival
UPI

LimeWire buys financially troubled Fyre Festival

Officials at U.S.-based website LimeWire have acquired the FyreFestival brand after emerging as the winning bidder for the fraud-plagued music festival.

Rita Ora and Taika Waititi are producing a stage musical about the Fyre Festival, which LimeWire announced it bought on Tuesday. Photo by Alex Gallardo/UPI UPI

Sept. 16 (UPI) -- Officials at U.S.-based website LimeWire have acquired the Fyre Festival brand after emerging as the winning bidder for the fraud-plagued music festival.

LimeWire officials said the purchase enables the digital music provider and the Fyre Festival to combine their brand identities and attract millions of new users.

"Fyre became a symbol of hype gone wrong, but it also made history," said LimeWire Chief Executive Officer Julian Zehetmayr in a news release.

"We're not bringing the festival back," he said. "We're bringing the brand and the meme back to life."

The purchase will enable LimeWire and Fyre to start a new chapter that is "grounded in technology, transparency and a sense of humor," according to the news release.

LimeWire was an early pioneer of online file sharing, which a federal judge ended in October 2010 by ordering it to stop illegally sharing files in a lawsuit filed by the Recording Industry Association of America.

LimeWire's new owners resurrected the brand in 2022 and seek to do the same with Fyre Festival.

"LimeWire's acquisition is not about repeating past mistakes," the news release said. "It's about saving one of the Internet's most infamous cultural memes from extinction and turning it into something new."

The Fyre Festival was a subsidiary of Fyre Media, whose owner was charged and convicted of wire fraud in 2018 for lying to at least two investors.

The Fyre Festival formerly sponsored a live music event and booked musical artists at venues across the nation.

Filmmaker Taika Waititi and his wife, singer-songwriter Rita Ora, last week announced they are producing a stage musical about the failure and eventual cancellation of the 2017 Fyre Music Festival.

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