On April 27, 2017, day 1 of the most luxurious and exclusive music festival was set to begin. Many affluent young adults spent thousands of dollars for a weekend of gourmet meals and a villa on the beach with Blink-182 music playing in the background. Instead, they were left stranded and cold with nothing but homemade sandwiches and FEMA tents. This is the disaster of Fyre Festival.
Entrepreneur Billy McFarland and rapper Ja Rule came up with the idea of Fyre Festival as an event to promote their new app, Fyre. Fyre was supposed to be an app where you could book musical artists directly for events. They decided to hold this festival on Norman’s Cay island in the Bahamas, an island that was formerly owned by one of the co-founders of the Medellín Cartel (led by Pablo Escobar). This was the perfect marketing ploy for McFarland and Ja Rule.
In late 2016, McFarland leased Norman’s Cay and the promotional video for Fyre Festival was filmed there with some of the biggest models in the world making appearances (Kendall Jenner, Hailey Bieber, and Bella Hadid to name a few). The new owner of Norman’s Cay wanted to change its reputation so as a condition to leasing the island, McFarland was not allowed to mention Pablo Escobar. The promotional video consisted of famous models swimming in the ocean and looking pretty and happy. The video branded Fyre Festival as this luxury getaway on Pablo Escobar’s private island.
The promotional video was very successful and Fyre Festival tickets sold out. However, in the video they mention that the island used to belong to Pablo Escobar. When the owner saw the video, he immediately kicked McFarland off the island. This is where things went downhill.
Without Norman’s Cay, McFarland had to find another island to host the festival. He eventually settled on an island in Great Exuma that was an abandoned Sandals Resort site. The main issue was that this island was not private and was much smaller than Norman’s Cay. The festival designers only had about 6 weeks to build the infrastructure meant for Norman’s Cay onto the new island.
Another issue was that McFarland did not announce this location change at all to the ticket holders. He also altered the map of the new island on promotional posts to make the island appear to be a private island. This was not only ethically wrong, it is also illegal. He purposely did this to deceive both festival ticket holders and Fyre Festival investors whose money he needed to build the festival’s infrastructure.
On top of this, McFarland would create VIP packages for Fyre Festival without actually having the resources for said packages. He would then use that money to pay off loans or pay for festival materials. As McFarland consulted other festival planning companies, he realized his original plans would cost much more than expected and many expenses were cut at the last minute. Instead of luxury villas,
they used leftover FEMA tents with mattresses inside.
The night before festival day, there was a huge thunderstorm that soaked every tent and mattress to the point that they were inhabitable. Unfortunately it was too late and guests were arriving less than 8 hours later. All of the musicians originally set to perform had backed out and the whole festival slowly became more disastrous.
After a certain point, all flights to and from the island were canceled when people realized how bad the festival became. However, hundreds of people had already shown up to the island and were now stuck with no food or liveable shelter and with all of their luxury promises unfulfilled. To call this festival a scam would be an understatement.
Aftermath:
McFarland is currently facing 8 different lawsuits, one being a $100 million for fraud and breach of contract. Fyre Festival became a huge meme on Twitter because not many people feel bad that rich kids got scammed. The models from the original promotional video received both public backlash and lawsuits because they misled consumers by not disclosing that they were being paid to promote this event.
Sources:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fyre_Festival
FYRE: The Greatest Party that Never Happened – Netflix ( I HIGHLY recommend watching this documentary. There are so many interesting and funny details to this story that I had to leave out.)