The Most Failed Music Festival Of All-Time Is Coming Back For Another Round, Another Netflix Doc Coming
From the ashes of the greatest music festival blunder in history, Fyre Festival II will rise. As covered by Entertainment Weekly, the infamous Fyre Festival founder Billy McFarland announced online that tickets for Fyre Festival II are now on sale. Seriously.
Proving that satire, like irony, is now dead, Fyre Festival II is being put together by Billy McFarland, the organizer of the original disastrous event.
McFarland announced Fyre Festival II last spring. His Fyre Festival partner, rapper Ja Rule, stated that he would not be involved in the second incarnation of the event. Tickets begin at $499 and range up to $7,999.
On top of Fyre Festival II, McFarland has a documentary in the works called After the Fyre. The Hollywood Reporter shared the announcement about the film last November. It will apparently follow McFarland on a treasure hunt in the Bahamas as he seeks a means of paying his debts to investors and vendors of the original Fyre Festival.
“It has been the absolute wildest journey to get here,” McFarland said, looking like a member of the Bluth family, “and it really all started during a seventh-month stint in solitary confinement. I wrote out this 50-page plan of how it would take this overall interest and demand in Fyre and how it would take my ability to bring people from around the world together to make the impossible happen.”
But wait, there’s more. McFarland is also working to bring the world a Fyre Festival Broadway musical. Whether or not it is in bad taste to exploit the story of your crimes for profit in order to pay for your crimes is beyond the scope of this article.
“It has been the absolute wildest journey to get here, and it really all started during a seventh-month stint in solitary confinement. I wrote out this 50-page plan of how it would take this overall interest and demand in Fyre and how it would take my ability to bring people from around the world together to make the impossible happen.”
Billy McFarland on Fyre Festival II
Billy McFarland was sentenced to prison in October of 2018 for defrauding investors of Fyre Festival to the tune of roughly $27 million. The money was supposed to be put towards an extravagant, luxury music festival in the Bahamas, but it turned into a financial and humanitarian disaster.
In case you missed the Netflix and Hulu documentaries about the ordeal, hundreds of excited festival goers flew into the Bahamas with the expectation of luxury housing, gourmet food, and an incredible live music lineup, all to take place on the white sand beaches of what was formerly Pablo Escobar’s private island.
Instead, they had soaked tents with dirt floors, cheese sandwiches, and one local band, all in a parking lot north of Sandals Resort. Thanks to another local event, the resort and hotels were all booked. Fyre Festival was also billed as a cashless event, meaning many attendees were without money for transportation.
Netflix and Hulu both capitalized on the disaster that was Fyre Festival with documentaries about the greatest music event that never was.
The whole debacle was a dumpster fyre (get it!) that became perhaps the most expensive meme of all time. While the world made fun of Fyre Festival, Billy McFarland was slapped with lawsuits worth millions and was branded a con artist. And you haven’t bought your ticket yet?
McFarland has spent his time since then working toward restitution. He apparently has a desire to try again and give people the Fyre Festival experience they deserve. The first festival’s failure was largely the result of poor planning. Big promises were made without any clue as to how much those offerings would actually cost to execute.
Has Billy McFarland learned his lesson? Did solitary confinement give him the focus he needed to make a business plan that really works? Will Fyre Festival be a hit that pulls off a legendary party, repays McFarland’s debts, and redeems him in the eyes of the world?
We don’t see why not! See you in the Caribbean!
