One of the most talked about things these past few weeks is a crazy revelation know as the Fyre Festival. Although the festival took place in 2017, it’s all anyone can talk about this month, because both Netflix and Hulu released documentaries highlighting the bad scene that it was. “Fyre: the greatest party that never happened” is Netflix take on a dramatic set of disasters that led to one of the flops ever. In 2016, young college dropout and entrepreneur Billy McFarland has the idea to throw one of the greatest “parties” or rather, the greatest music festival ever. To do this, he sunk millions upon millions into promotion and planning for what he thought was going to be the best weekend of his, and of hundreds’ others lives. McFarland knew one of the best ways to attract attention to his event was by using “influencers” – otherwise known as some of the worlds’ biggest names in pop culture who are highly “visible” online, to promote his event. These influencers, like Hailey Bieber, Kendall Jenner, and Gigi Hadid have millions upon millions of followers each, so McFarland knew he could easily monopolize off of their popularity. He paid them, and other beautiful models lots of money to fly down to the Bahamas and shoot hours worth of promotional videos, edited it on site, and thus- the beginning of the end.

It looked like it had it all, celebrities, beautiful water, and famous headliners, like Major Lazer and Blink-182. The promotional videos for Fyre looked almost too good to be true. They promised an incredible weekend, that looked almost too good to pass up. With popular festivals, like Coachella and Lollapalooza being a common experience for Instagrams hottest stars, it was almost a no brainer that something that appeared to be even more fun and Instagram worthy would sell out well. And it did- even at a high cost. Some tickets went for over 50,000 dollars, promising luxurious villas a the accommodation. However, nothing went as planned, bills didn’t get paid, lies were told, and by the time the festival rolled around, eager partygoers rolled up to this:

McFarlands lies finally caught up to him. He simply could not pull together “the greatest party on earth.” It wasn’t even a mediocre party. People fought over the minimal food rations, the shelters were looted, and chaos ensued. Ultimately, the Fyre Fest was a complete and utter flop, but the real sadness in this is that hundreds of Bahamian people worked without pay, and are still suffering the consequences. Luckily, a gofundme exuma-point-fyre-fest-debt was started to help these people get the money they deserve and has raised over 200,000!

I highly recommend both the Netflix and Hulu documentaries!