Thursday, May 04, 2017
Fyre Festival organizers blew all their money months early on models, planes, and yachts
VICE News: One month before thousands of well-heeled millennials were set to descend on a remote island in the Bahamas for the Fyre Festival to frolic on yachts, rub elbows with models, and hear acts like Blink 182 and Major Lazer, the organizers had a big problem.
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4 comments:
This is not surprising considering the media coverage the Fyre Festival debacle received in the past couple weeks. i thought it was interesting hearing that the real logistical meetings started for this in January and February considering we ourselves start planning much earlier for productions with vastly lower budgets. In a production, there are three resources that are the pillars of success, and those are People, Money, and Time. the organizers of the Fyre Festival had none of these. they left themselves with no time by thinking it was a good idea to promote the idea with less than half a year to achieve a massive task. next, from the accounts by employees, vendors, and other contractors, the organizers alienated much of their workforce, and disregarded the effect of things like customs on key contractors. This also ties in well with money, because they flat out refused to pay some of their vendors, and employees because they spent all of their budget on promotions and trips to the island with friends.
This being said, leaving their customers semi-stranded on an island without enough toilets, poor food, and sub-standard not even bordering the expected housing, is a horrible situation to put any customer in. it is irresponsible and a disgusting misrepresentation of good service. and the fact that they wanted to cover their asses by providing "Free" tickets for next years festival is laughable. honestly, after the debt hole they will be in from this travesty, they will have no hope of being sponsored, getting investments, or even trying to fund another festival.
In a really nihilist way, I think that the disaster of the Fyre Festival is one of the funniest things I have ever heard about. While the complete lack of planning or forethought has affected thousands of people, it is kind of a funny thing to think about. I hope this serves as a marker to people in the future trying to organize events like this--these things, especially on the scale that the Fyre festival was, takes many months of planning and organization to get together. You can't just get a couple of big names to endorse it and expect it to all work out--there are so many factors, especially in this, that went wrong and just weren't there, and there was a clear lack of forethought from anyone behind it. I hear they are making another Fyre Festival next year in the continental US, so I'm curious if they'll fix it or if it will be another disaster.
After reading this article, it's hard to feel sympathy for the organizers of Fyre Festival Because they seem to have had no understanding of or appreciation for the hard work and immense challenge that planning an event on that scale is. As the article goes into detail about, they threw away much of their money on surface items and promotional material that would make the event look good rather than addressing necessities, like toilets, showers, and utilities that would allow the people on the ground to properly set up and run the event. The quote featured in the headline of the article “let's just do it and be legends, man” was one employee's response to the serious scheduling concerns about the shortened timeline of the Festival. This quote, along with many other examples outlined in the article, demonstrate how the organizers fulfill the worst stereotypes of the author's frat boys planning a spring break getaway analogy. It is hard to have sympathy for people try to pull something like this off with zero attempt to grapple with hard practical issues, or understand the complicated and difficult work of event planning, that coupled with the descriptions of their work environment and I am extremely pleased that the only time I heard about this Festival was after the whole thing came crashing down around them.
I scrolled by so many Fyre Festival articles because I knew it was a disaster and I knew that reading the specifics about why it was a disaster would just make me mad. And here we are. I'm mad. Reading this article immediately made me think about Tom Haverford's business in Parks and Rec, called Entertainment 720. He and his business partner immediately blow all of their money on models and celebrities and a great venue, but they don't actually have a plan for what the hell they are doing. Of course, this is on a sitcom and is a fictionalized and dramatized version of real life because no one would actually do this right? Surprise they would. Yeah it's hard to plan a large scale festival but I mean that's the job man. It's hard to stage manage a huge Broadway musical but lots of people do it. I feel zero sympathy for the people in charge of this festival, because they are business professionals and knew (or at least should have known) what they were getting themselves into when they started.
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