The Fyre Festival
By: Owen Lillak - Student
The Festival that went up in fire. Before the Fyre Festival started, there was Billy MacFarland. He dropped out of college to start a credit card company called Magnises. The company had a very unique business strategy. They designed the card to feel expensive by using titanium for the card and the card would also get you access to private night clubs and suites in New York City. With the success of his business venture, he was able to network with some very powerful people. One of those people was Ja Rule, a famous musician and rapper back in the 1990s. Over drinks, they came up with the brilliant idea for a festival in the Bahamas with music, personal suites, alcohol, and luxury… and this was the Fyre Festival! Once the idea was born, a marketing plan was needed. Now unironically, they had a great marketing plan! They paid a bunch of social media influencers to post an orange screen to get people wondering and speculating. Then, they revealed the Fyre Festival which was set on a private island in the Caribbean called Fyre Cay, previously owned by Pablo Escobar (This will be important later). The festival was advertised to have luxury suites and lavash food and also as per the talent, there were big headlines in the form of Major Lazer and Blink 182. So…people bought their tickets immediately! The festival sales were a smashing hit with VIP tickets “allegedly” being sold for up to $12,000. After a few weeks of waiting, the day of the festival arrived so people got on a flight from Miami airport to Fyre Cay except there was one problem. Fyre Cay didn’t exist. What they advertised in the video was actually Norman’s Cay which was owned by Pablo Escobar. However, the Fyre Festival wasn’t there either. It was in the great Exuma. The island itself, which was supposed to be private, had a population of 7000 people. Now when people finally landed at the airport in Exuma, instead of just being able to walk on the island or take a golf cart or even a tram, they were put on an old run down school bus. Now, you may be wondering… what ever happened to those luxury villas? Now the luxury villas were instead replaced by old Haiti relief tents. People arrived but nobody could figure out which tents belonged to which person. At first staff tried to get people into single file lines however, the staff did not know people’s identity. Then, the staff declared “every person for themselves”. When it finally came to the first night, the real disaster took place. People’s items and luggage were being stolen from every which way even though the Fyre Festival did have a security system which was a bunch of old school high school lockers with no locks. There were rumors of feral dogs attacking attendees and rumors of people getting mugged by the locals and a tent caught fire. Now, at this point in the night, people were upset as they were there for seven hours and there was still no food. When they finally got food, it looked like this:
Now because of this, staff members started handing out tons of free tequila. Now the main attraction of this festival was the music talent and this is the most integral part of this operation,s. Sso peopleo people thought even with everything happening… at least they can kick back, relax, and enjoy the music! However…all the major bands pulled out! Major Lazer wasn’t even rumored to come in the first place. Now after seeing the problems, very few people managed to go to the Sandals Resort since the festival was basically in the parking lot. As for everyone else, there were no vacancies. After the first day was done, people in the morning started calling out to the American Embassy for help…and by the second day, everyone was loaded up onto the same old school bus and sent back to the airport. These people proved to be a problem for the airport and they were locked in. Luckily, people managed to make it home and no deaths occurred and few people were harmed. The Fyre Festival exploded as one of the biggest storms on social media. People were insulting the instagram celebrities who endorsed the festival and there was a fake tweet from Ja Rule saying it was a social experiment and after the festival concluded, Billy MacFarland went missing for one week. Afterwards, he came back to social media saying why things went downhill and that a storm flew in and changed all the advertising into lies,. And because of this, he offered people a full refund and they could get tickets to next year’s Fyre Festival! What do you think the people choose? Ja Rule apologized for the festival saying it wasn’t his fault and pinning it all on Billy. After only one week, the first lawsuit was served. There was a class action lawsuit where anyone that attended could join. Then, there were seven additional lawsuits. Then, a new player entered the field… the FBI.. claiming Billy MacFarland committed wire fraud with very serious prison time. Now, you may be wondering what exactly happened? Why did it get to this state? So we’re going to put it in a list of problems….
1- Organization Time - For a festival such as Burning Man, which is on a smaller scale compared to the Fyre Festival, which is still pretty big, it takes about 1.5 years to plan. The Fyre Festival took nine months to prepare for the event. This is about the time you need for a small scale convention.
2- The Island - Now Fyre Festival initially claimed to have an island at one point called Fyre Cay and this was true, they did have an island called Fyre Cay. They bought the island from a family who had previously owned it and they used this island for all the advertisements for this festival. However, it started to fall apart when the family made one condition. They were not allowed to say it was owned by Pablo Escobar until after the event. And what did they do in the first trailer?
Now the owner of the island, George Jung saw this and did not give the island to them because of breach of contract. So they lost a lot of money from breaching the contract and had to quickly move its resources to Great Exuma.
3- The Price - Now, you see whenever you look at the Fyre Festival, people assume it was a bunch of rich kids who were out in the middle of nowhere. But with their tickets costing $12,000 each and $250,000 for VIP tickets, all of this was fake news from news outlets. The actual price was around $1200 for the standard ticket and even early on as the day tickets went live you can get an early bird special for about $500. And if you put all of this into perspective, two weeks on a private island in the Bahamas with talent, food, and necessities paid for, is very cheap! They planned to have Fyre bands which are sort of like room key wristbands at the expensive hotels and what they wanted you to do is buy Fyre bucks to use at stands for food, drinks etc. It was reported that up to $2 million dollars were spent prior to the event. However, because of them having to relocate and hire new people so quickly, they ran out of money.
The Aftermath: After the event, before Billy MacFarland was arrested by the FBI, he started up a service called NYC VIP access with a man called Frank Tribble. Now, people link this to Fyre Festival because only people getting access to NYC VIP were Fyre Festival attendees. To basically sum up NYC VIP access, it was a pyramid scheme. That’s about it. However, just recently, in September 2022, Billy MacFarland was released from house arrest and he trieds to come up with the next big thing that’s not Fyre Festival. Now, as for Billy MacFarland’s business called Magnesis, he tried to sell it for $500,000 before going to prison but it was deemed fraudulent and went into involuntary bankruptcy. Now for the festival itself, the domain name for Fyre Festival was sold and currently it redirects to a Bahamian hotel chain and the company went into involuntary bankruptcy with the trademark name and brand still being up for grabs. And so that’s the end of the Fyre Festival. Now it lives on in infamy as a textbook case study of what not to do whether that be over ambition, time constraints, or straight up scaming your customers.
