Rolling Stone: A judge has placed the company that promoted Fyre Festival in bankruptcy, The Wall Street Journal reports. The decision was made in U.S. Bankruptcy Court, where three lenders were seeking to force Fyre Festival LLC into chapter seven bankruptcy following the remarkable disintegration of the Bahamas-based luxury music festival in April.
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I think the most puzzling aspect of the Fyre Festival debacle is how no person(s) involved seemed to receive what they paid for. The festival-goers publicly decried their experience on every social media platform, and now the investors come out to say they had received no return on their investments. On the surface, it seems to be fraud in the style of Bialystock and Bloom-- promise everything and deliver nothing. But this case doesn't quite have the finesse to be a fictional plot. I can't say that I sympathized with the festival-goers. With tickets selling for hundreds of dollars, the lives of that class of people that could afford those tickets (the sort of high-middle class associated with "white people problems"), objectively, aren't that hard. So if their greatest inconvenience is that they're stuck in the Bahamas with only relief-aid tents and little running water, my response is that they've almost experienced the daily life of a modern refugee.
I have a lot of reasons not to trust anyone associated with the Fyre Festival. The old saying that if it looks like a pig and smells like a pig, then it’s a pig can be fully applied here. Working in the entertainment industry, I am always on the lookout for new ideas, but I am also on the lookout for fraud. This is clearly fraud. The promoters, company managers, and all involved in the planning and execution of this festival should be dragged into the street and shot. This clearly was not an attempt to throw what could develop into a world-renowned music festival (Not that we need another one) but more so a chance to rip people off. It’s cases like this that ruin companies who rent out equipment and gear and the on the ground employees who are hired to set up, tear down, and run the event. The people at the top don’t care about the people at the bottom and the behavior of those at the top in this case bring a bad name to the whole industry of concert/festival planning and promotion. I recall from another article about a company who had millions of dollars of gear in the Bahamas and couldn’t get it back because the festival organizers wouldn’t pay the import/export fees to the Government. The Government threatened to auction off the equipment. The people at the top in this case are scammers who only wanted to make a quick buck. Let them go into Bankruptcy. Let their lives be ruined the way they ruined the lives of countless others over the all mighty dollar.
The festival industry is a bit crazy and still trying to find out how it works. I’ve read a lot of articles recently about the backlash and problems that came out of the Fyre Festival, but it has actually sparked a larger conversation of how festivals still are not adapting to these problems. They aren’t learning. Festivals in Europe in particular have been riddled with problems. Issues have included hazardous conditions, headliners dropping out, and much more. I think that Fyre got a lot of attention in particular compared to other festivals that have issues because of the market that it was advertising to. It is understood, I would hope, that festivals face different variables than one-off concerts. There are more unknowns and overall, it’s a larger operation. That doesn’t mean that they can use that as an excuse to not deliver on what people have paid for or be able to explain their decisions.
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