When two documentaries about the ill-fated Fyre Festival debuted in 2019, people around the world got an inside look at the poorly planned event that eventually landed organizer Billy McFarland behind bars.
None of that is stopping McFarland from trying for “Fyre Festival II” – in fact, the first round of 100 tickets had sold out within a day of his Monday announcement that Fyre is coming back. That’s according to the festival website.
It says that the festival will be held in “The Caribbean” starting at noon Dec. 6 of next year (though it notes that date is “subject to change”). You too could possibly snag a ticket… if that seems like a good idea to you.
“We’re dropping the first Pre-Sale FYRE Passes which includes 1 ticket to FYRE Festival II and access to FYRE Pop-Ups, Experiences, and The FYRE Crew Community,” reads the site. There is no information about what the pop ups or experiences might be.
For the last Fyre Festival, McFarland teamed up with hip-hop artist Ja Rule. In a now infamous tweet, Ja Rule said “I too was hustled, scammed, bamboozled, hood winked, lead astray!!!” regarding he festival. He later sold the tweet as an NFT, according to NME.
Even before Netflix’s “Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened” and Hulu’s “Fyre Fraud” were released, tweets depicting FEMA tents and hastily made cheese sandwiches indicated that something wasn’t right with the event. It had been billed as a luxury music festival and promoted with advertisements featuring well-known models.
According to the U.S. Department of Justice, McFarland started Fyre Media in 2016 “to build a digital application that would allow individuals organizing commercial events, such as concerts, to bid for artist and celebrity bookings at such events.” He then conducted a scheme to induce people to invest in the company by misrepresenting earnings and other issues, ultimately resulting in $24 million in losses for around 80 investors.
In late 2016, he created a subsidiary of the company called Fyre Festival LLC to hold a music festival over two weekends in the Bahamas. He made “repeated misrepresentations to investors with respect to their investments,” in the subsidiary, said the DOJ.
McFarland also defrauded a ticket vendor out of $2 million in advance tickets and orchestrated a ticket fraud scheme, it said. Those who worked with McFarland on the festival found themselves in unpleasant situations as well.
“Billy called and said: ‘We’re going to need you to take one for the team,’” said longtime event planner Andy King in his revelation that that McFarland asked him to perform a sex act to secure a water supply for the festival. Marc Weinstein, a consultant for the festival, also called McFarland “a liar” in an interview for the Netflix documentary.
In 2018, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison with three years of supervised release. Entertainment Weekly reported that he was released last May after serving four years.
“This is a big day,” said McFarland, wearing a white robe and air pods, in the YouTube announcement he posted this week. “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 bring people from around the world together to make the impossible happen.”
As of Tuesday, it appeared that McFarland was planning to sell up to 777 tickets to the festival in a series of “drops,” each labelled as “coming soon.” These drops are priced at $799, $1,199, $1,799, $2,699, $4,899 and $7,999 per ticket, with prices growing for each subsequent drop.
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