Suche
Mein Konto
Can LimeWire Brand Juice take over the new NFT-based music marketplace?
Launched in 2000, LimeWire was a popular peer-to-peer file-sharing service until it was sued by the Recording Industry Association of America in 2010. The NFT marketplace will be an artist alternative to Spotify, which pays out notoriously low royalties. Any music fan born before, say, 1990 probably remembers LimeWire, which was created in the days of free MP3 swapping services Napster and BitTorrent gained importance. But music labels saw the service as an enabler of wholesale intellectual property theft and sued. After a four-year court battle that ended with a “permanent injunction” in New York, the company withdrew 50 million...
Can LimeWire Brand Juice take over the new NFT-based music marketplace?
- LimeWire wurde im Jahr 2000 eingeführt und war ein beliebter Peer-to-Peer-Filesharing-Dienst, bis er 2010 von der Recording Industry Association of America verklagt wurde
- Der NFT-Marktplatz wird eine Künstleralternative zu Spotify sein, das notorisch geringe Lizenzgebühren auszahlt
Any music fan born before, say, 1990 probably remembers LimeWire, which rose to prominence in the days of free MP3-swapping services Napster and BitTorrent.
But music labels saw the service as an enabler of wholesale intellectual property theft and sued. After a four-year court battle that ended With a “permanent injunction” in New York, the company pulled the plug on peer-to-peer users from 50 million monthly users.
Now two Austrian entrepreneurs – brothers Julian and Paul Zehetmayr – are bringing LimeWire back with a crypto twist. The Zehetmayrs acquired LimeWire's intellectual property in 2021 for an undisclosed sum, hoping to spur the launch of a new music-focused NFT marketplace.
The project – which is otherwise unrelated to its namesake – is set to launch in May and will allow fans and music collectors to trade music-related assets using NFTs (non-fungible tokens).
According to LimeWire's Global Communications Lead Sara Moric, the platform differs from major players in today's NFT marketplace business such as OpenSea and Rarible in that it is custodial and allows customers to purchase NFTs with fiat currencies.
“To be clear, we are big fans of decentralization,” Moric told Blockworks. “At the same time, we believe the market is not yet ready to make fully decentralized platforms attractive and usable to the mainstream.”
NFTs are minted on a blockchain - the company declined to specify until the announcement later this month - and can be withdrawn to non-custodial wallets.
“We are actually combining the best of both worlds and allowing users to trade decentralized collectibles on an easy-to-use custodial platform that offers fiat payments, easy login without a wallet, and a very simple and clean user experience,” Moric said.
The plan is to share 90% of primary sales revenue with artists, while LimeWire will take a 10% cut. The platform commission for secondary sales will be lower and will generate artist royalties.
In Q4 there will also be a token, LMWR, that will allow users to reduce commission fees, participate in a rewards program, and participate in voting and moderation of initiatives.
When LimeWire was shut down in 2010, a U.S. District Court judge was in office called his service “a massive piracy machine.” (Incidentally, Napster suffered a similar fate in 2002, while BitTorrent survived as a decentralized network that was eventually acquired by Justin Sun in 2018 to bolster the Tron ecosystem.)
“Web2” successors like Spotify bring record companies into the action, but pay the artists a small fraction of the sales revenue. NFT-based music services are designed to establish the provenance of media content while equitably distributing revenue, including royalties, to creators.
. .
The post Can LimeWire Brand Juice Acquire New NFT-Based Music Marketplace? is not financial advice.