After the disastrous Fyre Festival was held in 2017, which left hundreds of people stranded on an island in the Bahamas (resulting in multiple lawsuits), the event’s organizer Billy McFarland has decided that the festival deserves a second chance, even after he was convicted of fraud for the fiasco.
According to a recent tweet from McFarland, his redo of the chaotic event, Fyre Fest 2, is apparently off to a good start as it has allegedly garnered over 1,200 applications for tickets, which are selling for a startling price, in a matter of a few hours.
10 hours in: 1,208 unique applications for over 5,000 tickets. fyre 2 will only hold 3,000 people
— Billy McFarland (@pyrtbilly) September 9, 2024
Tickets for Fyre Fest 2 are priced between $1,400 to $1.1 million, according to the event’s website. The event is supposed to be held on April 25, 2025, for four days, on a private island off the Caribbean coast in Mexico.
In a new interview with Today, McFarland also revealed that the festival currently has no lineup, and apparently won’t be just focused on music, unlike the botched event in 2017.
“We haven’t booked any talent for Fyre 2,” said McFarland in the interview. “It’s not going to be just music – for example, karate combat. We’re in talks with them to set up a pit to have, like, live fights at Fyre Festival 2.”
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He also claimed that there will be “luxury yachts,” planes that allow attendees to travel to other islands and countries, and scuba diving.
The unveiling of Fyre Fest 2 comes after the Fyre Festival in 2017 went viral for all the wrong reasons. The festival at that time was advertised as an “immersive music festival” on a “remote and private island” in the Bahamas. Ad campaigns for the event even featured celebrities such as Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and Emily Ratajkowski, etc. The music lineup also consisted of major artists such as Blink-182, Migos and Disclosure.
Many consumers, who paid thousands of dollars for tickets, were hit with a grim reality in April that year when they arrived at the island where the festival was set to take place. Many attendees found that the island was littered with disaster relief tents, and they also claimed that they had limited access to water and were served cheese sandwiches in styrofoam boxes.
The "catering" (which cost extra) was a slice of untoasted bread, two slices prepackaged cheese, and a side salad. pic.twitter.com/BoKxWAMI5i
— Iron Spike (@Iron_Spike) April 28, 2017
The attendees were stranded on the island due to flights to the area being canceled and delayed. Some attendees even reported having their luggage lost, and documented the chaos on social media.
Many of the festival’s scheduled performers also pulled out of the event once they heard that it was fraudulent.
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McFarland and rapper JaRule, who also promoted the festival, were hit with several lawsuits over the event, including a $100 million class-action lawsuit from the attendees. Documentaries of the disastrous festival were even made that detailed how everything went south.
McFarland also faced wire fraud criminal charges related to defrauding the festival’s investors. In 2018, after pleading guilty to the charges, he was sentenced to six years in federal prison and ended up serving only four. He was released in 2022 on probation. McFarland was also ordered to pay back the $26 million he collected from investors.
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