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The disgraced founder behind the original Fyre Festival is out of prison and announced his plans to run a second iteration of the failed music festival in April 2025.
Entrepreneur Billy McFarland, along with rapper Ja Rule, presented Fyre Festival as a luxury Bahamian event with high-end dome accommodations, food from celebrity chefs, and performers like Blink-182.
What attendees got instead were tents on the beach in the rain, cheese sandwiches and bands that bailed.
Many assumed the Fyre Festival, which has since been the subject of two documentaries, would never happen again. But McFarland claims he is trying to hold Fyre Fest II in 2025. He said in a recent interview that the festival will run from April 25 to 28 on an as-yet-unnamed private island off the coast of Mexico.
His intentions to bring back the festival, which led to him doing jail time for wire fraud charges, was shocking to people in the music world.
“Watching the interview with McFarland was surreal,” said Andrew Mall, an associate music professor at Northeastern University who’s taught courses on creating a successful music festival. “Here’s a guy who literally went to prison for defrauding people the first time he tried to organize a festival, pitching a festival to a major news organization. Why are there even attempts to take him seriously? There seems to be a lot (of people) in the music news space that (aren’t) buying into this. … I would be very surprised if it goes off without a hitch.”
Tickets for the festival will range from $1,400 to $1.1 million, the latter of which will afford attendees the chance to enjoy luxury yachting, island hopping and scuba diving with McFarland, who said he is still in the process of booking musical acts for the event.
Can McFarland pull off a successful music festival after the disaster that was Fyre Festival? He seems to think so — McFarland told NBC News he is working with an unnamed production company on the event and holding it in a place with existing infrastructure such as lodging and restrooms, unlike the original Fyre Festival. But others are skeptical.
“The reason it failed the first time is because a grifter was running the festival,” said Rebekah Moore, an assistant music professor at Northeastern who also teaches courses on music festivals. “He didn’t have the investments that he needed to actually pull it off. Nothing has changed except that he spent four years in prison.”
Moore and Mall agree McFarland’s lack of experience combined with a tight timeline contributed to Fyre Fest’s failure. McFarland tried to pull the festival together — including building the lodging he promised — in a matter of months. Most festivals, Mall said, take at least a year to pull together, and destination events that need infrastructure to be built for them can take even longer.
McFarland may be primed to run into these issues again, Mall continued. It’s already late in the booking season to get musical acts onboard and many are not likely to want to be involved given how the last Fyre Festival went down.
With the right sponsorships, investors and stakeholders, it’s possible to pull off a second festival, Moore said. But that doesn’t mean McFarland should do it.
Destination festivals like these have a huge impact on the environment and local communities, added Moore. She herself has worked on festivals, including one in Bali that was also run by an inexperienced founder. The Bali event ended up going bankrupt and being canceled, leaving Moore and the staff without any pay to show for their work.
“It was a nightmare,” Moore said. “What that taught me about people like Billy is … people who want to have a great time end up exploiting places where there’s often a lot of poverty and lack of resources. With the last failed Fyre Fest, there are a lot of people who were disadvantaged beyond the people that were featured in the films about it. These are the kinds of folks for whom missing a paycheck is not a small thing. I know from experience with a similar grifter. It’s just so ridiculous he’s doing this again.”
It might seem like even if he does pull it off, the legacy from the first festival is not great. But Mall said that may be part of the appeal for people. McFarland said he’s already sold 100 presale tickets for $500 each. Mall said those limited tickets likely went to people who are looking to be part of the notoriety.
Woodstock was also deemed a failure in the sense that it also lost money and placed its attendees in terrible conditions, Mall said, and yet has obtained “mythic status” as part of the counterculture movement.
“The branding issue is why people are excited about it,” Mall said. “I’m not sure the brand is a lucrative brand, but it is a brand that has a lot of media attention. I think Billy McFarland’s motive is purely financial. This is the only brand he has that’s worth something.”