In 2017, this event presented as a “luxury music festival” had turned into a fiasco due to a cruel lack of organization.
Despite a major controversy surrounding the infamous music festival Fyre its organizer, businessman Billy McFarland has announced that a second edition will be held soon.
“Fyre Festival II is finally in full swing. Tell me why you should be invited,” Billy McFarland, released a year ago from prison, where he was serving a sentence for fraud, wrote on Twitter on Monday.
Sold as a “luxury music festival”, the event organized in the Bahamas in 2017 had turned tragic and had turned out to be anarchy.
Organizational issues
In 2017, Billy McFarland, CEO of Fyre Media Inc. and rapper Ja Rule announced the creation of a festival like Coachella, spread over two weekends on a private island in the Bahamas with varying prices. between 1,000 and 11,000 euros per ticket depending on the options chosen.
But a few weeks before its holding, the event relayed on the networks against remuneration by Kendall Jenner, Hailey Baldwin, Bella Hadid or even Emily Ratajkowski turns into a nightmare.
Wishing to organize the festival in too short a time, Billy McFarland and Ja Rule are dropped by almost all their sponsors and partners and all the announced artists cancel their visit. But the two men decide however to maintain the event.
As a result, on D-Day, the festival-goers who had paid thousands of euros to come, were finally confronted with tents barely erected, “gourmet” meals consisting of a piece of cheese and two slices of bread, flights, soaked blankets from the storm… and of course, no concerts.
A fiasco that was the subject of a Netflix documentary called Fyre: The Best Festival That Never Happened released in 2018.
26 million euros fine
Shortly after this aborted festival, Billy McFarland was arrested for “electronic fraud” and sentenced to six years in prison as well as a fine of 26 million euros to reimburse the investors of the event.
The businessman would have presented false documents and greatly overestimated his fortune and the income of his company, Fyre Media, to convince investors to participate in his festival.
Benefiting from an early release, Billy McFarland was released from prison in March 2022 and admitted, during an interview on the show Good Morning America, to have been “wrong” to maintain the holding of the Fyre Festival in view of the conditions.
“I made a mistake. I had these early investors, employees… But I was so insecure that I thought the only way to prove to people that I was right was to succeed , and that led me down this terrible path,” he said at the time.
