The Fyre Festival
“It seems like you should know if there’s running water before you put on a festival on your site”
In late 2015 and early 2016, Ja Rule (who had some shitty rap songs in the early 2000s) teamed up with wannabe entertainment entrepreneur Billy McFarland to create a company called “Fyre”. Key to this company would be an annual “Fyre Festival”, which would “redefine” music festivals and evidently change the world of entertainment and pop culture forever.
While I could continue to try to explain it, I’ll go ahead and let the slides they used to raise $25 million speak for itself (you can find the full deck here):
Damn — I want to go to the “Cultural Experience of the Decade” that will reference “the five elements of the earth”.
The Lead-Up
Now that Ja Rule had raised $25 million to “ignite that type of energy” in his guests with a festival on some random island in the Bahamas, he had to start convincing people to show up. So, he and the rest of Fyre spent a couple million dollars flying out some of the most popular Instagram celebrities and getting them to shoot videos and photos in the the Bahamas.
They paid Kendall Jenner $250,000 for her promotion, and paid hundreds of other “influencers” as well. Notably, many of these “influencers” failed to disclose they were being paid by Fyre for their endorsement, causing a bevy of violations against FTC disclosure rules.
Now that Ja Rule had gotten people going with obscure references to Pablo Escobar, it was time to take it to the next level. Fyre Festival attempted to hire a TV production company to film a reality show about the festival, but that fell through after Ja Rule failed to pay an early $100,000 bill.
Fyre kept going with the social media marketing though. Notably, they kept talking about how tickets were “limited” and running out.
Time to…plan?
At this point, its early 2017, and while Ja Rule and crew had spent plenty of time on marketing, they had notably forgotten to plan any of the logistics, and it looks like they had evidently also completely forgotten to plan any of the financials for this festival. Here is where things start to get interesting.
In late February, McFarland evidently takes out a high interest $5 million dollar loan after realizing that they can’t pay for shit. According to a toilet provider, just getting trailers for toilets and showers out to this island would cost over $1 million, a factor that Fyre evidently had not considered…
Flash forward to April, the Wall Street Journal reports that some artists who were supposed to perform are starting to complain that they have not received their promised payment, and some customers are starting to get antsy that there has been almost no communication.
Next, a local publication from the island where the festival is supposed to take place posts this:
This article intriguingly pointed out some interesting facts about the festival’s marketing:
- The festival marketing videos showed images of a completely different island.
- The island the festival was taking place on was never actually owned by Pablo Escobar
- Major Lazer, the original headliner that Ja Rule mentioned in his deck to raise money, was booked at a different venue in Texas during the Fyre Festival.
From here, shit goes haywire. A number of additional publications like Vanity Fair post more scathing articles pointing out numerous inconsistencies regarding…..well, everything about the festival. Then, Blink-182 (the other original headliner) pulls out the week of the festival, noting “we’re not confident we have what we need”.
The Festival Begins
And so we arrive at the first day of the festival itself. Fyre had organized charter planes to go back and forth from Miami to the island throughout the course of the festival, and as the first attendees arrived on the island, they were greeted by some of the bleakest shit I have ever seen.
Attendees were promised “”yoga on the beach, water trampolines, seabobbing… music, art, food and… $1 million of real treasure and jewels hidden around the island”, as well as countless celebrities in attendance, but they got this:
What happened next will NOT shock you
As you may expect, within a few hours of the first attendees arriving, twitter was going haywire, and the event was starting to devolve into chaos as there was no electricity, water, infrastructure, celebrities, or just about anything else.
A bunch of people tried to return to the airport and totally overwhelmed it, causing a massive bottleneck of people trying to leave the island, with no planes to support them. Bahamian authorities basically shut down the airport and canceled all inbound flights.
Finally, the next morning, the festival was officially canceled “due to unforeseen circumstances”, with Ja Rule proclaiming that the festival was “NOT A SCAM” and that this was “NOT [HIS] FAULT”.
The Aftermath
While Ja Rule and his crew continued to try to play down the cancellation, arguing that is wasn’t their fault and blaming it, among other things, on the weather.
While Fyre did offer to refund all attendees, that wasn’t quite enough to assuage the damage that had been done. They were quickly hit with a $100 million class action lawsuit arguing they flew people into the Bahamas knowing that the festival was fucked. Their pitch deck was then leaked, providing some of the lulz I hope you enjoyed to millions of people, and then they were hit with another $100 million lawsuit for breach of contract.
Over the course of may they were hit with another three lawsuits, so you might say things aren’t looking good for them.
Over this time, a number of employees who had been involved in one way or another with the shitshow that was the Fyre Festival have come out and provided some context on just how this happened. It mostly revolves around Ja Rule and other organizers being pure bricks:
“Things like water [supply], bathrooms and other everyday structures that should have been in place six months before — none of that had been done. We all said to them, ‘It takes at least eight months to a year to produce a festival, you have to push the date’ — we stressed that and said that over and over. And they were like ‘It’ll be fine, it’s not that big of a deal.’
“We said, ‘What you’ve promised [in statements and advertising promoting the festival] as opposed to what we’re even maybe capable of delivering in this amount of time is not the same. You’re going to destroy your brand if you try to have it on this date and don’t deliver what you promised. If you push the date a year, people will be upset. But once you deliver what you promised, they’ll get over it.’ But it was like they didn’t care: They literally kept saying, ‘We’re gonna be legends.’”
“I kept stressing that they had to get festival insurance, you can’t run a festival without it, and I honestly don’t know if they ever got it”
“The marketing person behind this entire thing is Grant,” one said. “He kept saying in meetings, ‘I’m a marketing genius, I’m a prodigy — [the concerns] don’t matter, we’re gonna sell this and it’s gonna be amazing.’ He said that over and over and over.”
However, the good news after all of this is that some festival attendees managed to band together and make these cool t-shirts.
