Update: 5 Mag heard back from David from VIP Ultima who confirmed that the email is legit and the service is shutting down. If you have tracks on the service you want or feedback to preserve, you should probably get it now.
Original Story:
Telling your customers you’re going out of business and directing them to a competitor would be the dankest of April Fool’s jokes, though that can never be entirely ruled out.
VIP Ultima, a DJ promo service, is closing, according to a strange email sent out clients and other contacts.
5 Mag attempted to validate the email (which was sent from “help@vipultima.com”) with VIP Ultima. Authentication is complicated by the fact that the company has been inactive on most social media for years. The public-facing part of the site appears to be functional. We have not yet heard back; this story will be updated if we do. David from VIP Ultima confirmed the email below is legitimate:
The email 5 Mag received and compared with others reads:
“Hi,
Two days ago, VIP Ultima server had a major hardware breakdown and we couldn’t restart the server until some physical maintenance was done.
The server is up for a few hours now.
Unfortunately due to covid we’re out of business.
We’ve been giving big discounts to a lot of labels and even some free accounts to support the scene.
Which ended up leaving us with a lack of ressources and we are forced to stop the service.
It’s been a pleasure to serve all of you for over 12 years.
Stay safe.
David
PS: If you are looking for a new promo service we recommend FatDrop, drop Alex a line saying VIP Ultima sent you.”
5 Mag has confirmed that the VIP Ultima website was indeed down much of March 31st, and has emails from several years ago that were likewise signed by “David.”
The last available business registration address for VIP Ultima (which is included on the site’s contact page points to a residential condo in Vancouver, British Columbia, though a PR contact who has dealt with VIP Ultima in the past has suggested that the site was based in France. The Facebook page linked from VIP Ultima’s website is unavailable and was last saved by the Internet Archive in 2015. VIP Ultima’s official Twitter account was last updated in 2013. Most of the tweets sent to VIP Ultima in the last few years concerned the site’s continued use of Flash which is no longer supported by browsers.
Logo originally taken from — no kidding — MySpace.
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