CMU School of Drama


Wednesday, February 13, 2019

'Fyre Wouldn't Happen In The UK': A Look At The International Festival Market

Pollstar: A panel dubbed "International Festivals: Juicing Up a Mature Marketplace" looked at the current state of the international festival business and arrived at the conclusion that while the market was generally thriving, mid-size festivals in particular would have a hard time going forward.

3 comments:

Emma Patterson said...

I have yet to enjoy the competing Fyre documentaries on Hulu and Netflix; however, I have spent quite an amount of time contemplating how this became such a disaster. I think that the value of having one headliner is often lost on older generations. I have spent a decent amount of time explaining to my father that, yes, in fact, having someone at Kardashian level fame present for an event will immediately convince thousands of us plebeians to shell out our life savings for a ticket. Thanks to social media and Instagram fame, information on headliners and guest lists can be distributed on a mass scale in seconds. I think the difference between global and independent festivals is really interesting, and the idea that, at least for now, they can both succeed. The amount of steps that these festivals need to jump through to get off the ground in licensing, booking artists, convincing influencers to attend, and whatnot is really challenging. I think that the idea of safety in these festivals is something that I never really considered, but is such a massive element. These festivals go on for days and needs for housing, food, safety in the shows themselves, and even more things I can’t even think of is critical, and it was likely the second core reason that Fyre failed, other than the fact that they had no money.

Lauren Sousa said...

I have watched the documentary on Netflix about the Fyre festival and the actual progression of that festival getting to that point actually blew my mind. The fact that industry professionals actually got involved in the event and didn’t remove themselves from it as soon as possible was a testament to how persuasive/ manipulative the director of the festival really was. I’m glad that leading industry professional don’t believe such a disaster could happen in the UK and we should strive for more of those regulations to be put in place. Honestly the effect that that idiotic excuse for a festival had on the locals in that area was devastating and inexcusable by any true industry professional. I saw an article that Ja Rule was initiating another festival and that was insane to me because so many of the local citizens remained uncompensated. If he wants to initiate another festival he needs to redress the damage that occurred from the first one.

GabeM said...

After some further research into the Fyre festival I had done prior to reading this article, I found myself a lot more aware of boutique music festivals. There is no doubt that these are a primarily international ordeal and usually are hosted somewhere in Europe. I think the title of this article is a little click baity, the article really is not why something such as the Fyre festival could not happen in Europe, the festival is only mentioned once at the end to brag about the licensing laws of Europe. Despite that aspect, the article is well written but poorly formatted. The wide text field and short paragraphs get mixed up fairly easily and make it hard to follow. The Fyre festival was without a doubt a failure, but it was an event that was so blindly lead by two people who did not know what it took to put together a production this size and the world saw how quickly it all fell apart.