Remember Fyre Fest? Touted as a luxury music festival in 2017, Fyre Festival promised the world: supermodels, first-class cuisine, luxury villas, and private beaches. What paying guests received instead were cheese sandwiches, disaster-relief tents, and sodden mattresses on a remote Bahamian island.
The debacle resulted in founder Billy McFarland receiving a six-year prison sentence for wire fraud, and facing a $100m class action lawsuit alongside rapper Ja Rule. McFarland pleaded guilty to two counts in March 2018. He was released four years later.
Netflix and Hulu chronicled the fiasco, painting McFarland as an indefatigable grifter. The Netflix flick Fyre shows McFarland jumping straight into another scam, offering fake tickets to exclusive events such as Met Gala and Coachella.
Eight years on, undeterred by history or reputation McFarland was seeking redemption.
“My dream is finally becoming a reality,” McFarland told the Today Show.
Fyre Fest 2 was pegged from May 30 to June 2. Packages for the sequel to the failed festival ranged from $1,400 to $1.1 million, promising yachts, scuba diving, and island-hopping. 100 presale tickets available last year were $499 a pop.
McFarland claims he was motivated by a desire to repay the $26m he still owes in restitution and to demonstrate reform. To show his investors he isn’t another fraud, he embarked on a mission – sans Ja Rule – to reignite the Fyre. But it wasn’t an apology tour. Turns out that when you are a convicted con man with something to prove, the redemption arc tends to end in a cliff.
Combustible sequel?
Old habits die hard. From the start, the Fyre sequel bore all the hallmarks of the original: ticket sales without secured venues, vague promises of luxury, and a conspicuous absence of actual musical acts. The development was beset by a range of challenges that unfolded over a few months, like a slow-moving train crash.
Exorbitant ticket prices with no clear lineup or plans led to few buyers materialising. The event was quietly cancelled amid poor sales and mounting scepticism.
Though McFarland pledged 40 performers, only Antonio Brown, a former NFL player, and a Blink-182 tribute band were ever named. Understandably, few artists wished to associate with a brand synonymous with calamity.
Ever since Fyre’s very public collapse in 2017, McFarland’s public image took a huge hit and working with him was the public relations equivalent of kryptonite. Small Bahamian businesses still await payment from the 2017 debacle.
Venue troubles allegedly compounded the disarray. This time, the location was the thing more elusive than the setlist. McFarland chose the Mexican island of Isla Mujeres, off the coast of Cancun. But the Isla Mujeres government said they were not working with the Fyre Festival. So too did the management of Impression Isla Mujeres by Secrets, the five-star hotel that the Fyre website claimed would provide accommodation for those in the high band of ticket prices.
The festival then pivoted to the Mexican resort town of Playa del Carmen, which lies south of Cancun. The town wasn’t playing, saying that “after a responsible review of the situation, it is confirmed that there are no records, plans or conditions that indicate the holding of such an event in the municipality.”
But on March 27, during a Fyre Festival 2 press conference in Playa del Carmen, the founder of Martina Beach Club said the festival had the required permits for the city.
During the same conference, McFarlane, donning an electric ankle monitor in New York, pleaded with journalists to “stop reporting that Fyre 2 isn’t happening so I can try to ask for travel permission”.
Two weeks later, another hiccup. By April, organisers postponed the show, citing the absence of a confirmed venue. Once again, the Fyre team had sold an idea, rather than an actual event.
Now, McFarland has put the entity up for sale. Calling Fyre a “movement” and “one of the most powerful attention engines in the world”, McFarland is vending the “brand, including its trademarks, IP, digital assets, media reach, and cultural capital - to an operator that can fully realise its vision.”
The festival’s website claims a new Caribbean location stands ready, endorsed by local leadership, though no details are provided. The Fyre brand appears to have taken seriously the principle that “bad publicity is still good publicity”, with other selling points listed on the site pointing to “organic growth” and being “the most talked about US-based music festival in the world since 2017”.
McFarland may have extinguished this iteration of Fyre, but can a grifter change its stripes?
