The now-infamous Fyre Festival was an epic disaster of a music festival that was supposed to take place in the spring of 2017. I watched the Fyre documentaries that recently debuted on both Netflix [Fyre: The Greatest Party That Never Happened] and Hulu [Fyre Fraud], and I couldn’t sit still through either of them. So many of the decisions that were made go against everything I have learned both as a musician / small-time music manager and as a student affairs professional involved in promoting concerts on a college campus.
Since I’m still twitching from what I watched, I thought it was the perfect time to write a post about the main reasons the Fyre Festival collapsed.
If you’re curious about some of things that Fyre should have done to put on a safe and successful show, be sure to check out my companion piece Behind The Scenes at the Big Show. [Coming Soon]
QUICK BACKGROUND FOR THOSE OF YOU UNFAMILIAR WITH FYRE FESTIVAL:
The Fyre Festival was supposed to be a music festival taking place over two weekends in the Bahamas featuring some of the top acts of 2017 promoted, and attended by, some of the top social media influencers in the world.
When the festival failed spectacularly in the spring of 2017, there were countless post-mortems from all the major media outlets trying to explain what went wrong. In early 2019 both Netflix and Hulu released feature-length documentaries.
Each documentary has its strong points. I personally prefer the Netflix version because it follows more of a chronological story, but they are both worth a watch.
From both documentaries you’ll learn about how Millennials with too much money and too much Fear of Missing Out (FOMO) were duped into paying thousands of dollars for what they thought would be their generation’s Woodstock — only to be met with FEMA tents, no infrastructure, no entertainment, and no flight home.
While it’s hard to feel bad for rich and entitled would-be concert goers, both documentaries also show the impact on innocent Bahamians who did a lot of work and were never paid.
The whole fiasco ended in lawsuits totalling millions of dollars and jail time for the organizers.
REALITY CHECK
The Fyre Festival was initially conceived to launch the Fyre app. The app was supposed to tackle the problem of the “nasty business of booking,” as co-founder Ja Rule put it. But here’s the secret: the business is not so nasty!
With the exception of artists that insulate themselves behind friends and family and don’t even listen to their agencies, most serious booking inquiries are answered in a timely manner. While the process outlined in the companion piece may be lengthy, that’s largely due to the multiple stakeholders in a public institution of higher education. If you are just a promoter with a venue and money, many of the steps discussed in that post can be drastically simplified.
That being said, there’s likely a big difference between contacting high-level talent for a legitimate performance and contacting the same calibre of talent to show up to your birthday party – which is one of the “problems” Fyre was meant to solve.
THE ANNOUNCEMENT
Now here’s where I’ll give credit where credit is due. Fyre’s announcement strategy, while expensive as all get-out, was amazing. If you take 10 of the top models and Instagram influencers in the world to one of the most beautiful places in the world and then let the booze flow and the cameras roll, you’ll get all the buzz you need.
On top of that initial buzz, Fyre had Kendall Jenner and over 200 other top names in social media post about the event. It was enough to kick all the Millennials in the world into instant FOMO status.
THE CATCH
None of it was built yet.
WHAT, WHAT?
Yep, the folks behind Fyre sold over 90% of their tickets in a day and nothing was built.
In my post Behind The Scenes at the Big Show, I talk about all the steps that the student organization has to go through to host a major concert. Those essentially boil down confirming that:
- Yes, there is enough money to do this, even it if fails to meet ticket sale expectations
- Yes, the facility can handle the demands of the production
- Yes, we have adequate life safety measures in place to ensure a safe concert-going experience
None of these elements were in place at the Fyre Festival, and it only got worse.
LET’S TAKE A STEP BACK AND LOOK AT WHO WAS INVOLVED IN FYRE
- Billy McFarlane: Best known as the “visionary” behind Magnesis (a failed members club / credit card). He went to jail.
- Ja Rule: Best known for screaming MURDER! in a gravelly voice almost 20 years ago and continuing to insist that he’s relevant to the music business
- Andy King: A 30-year veteran of event management who was willing to get down (pun intended) to work and frankly should have known better.
- Marc Weinstein: Freelance festival consultant and, according to the Netflix documentary, the only person on staff who sounded alarms in writing.
- Mark Musters: Creative director who seemed to understand how crazy this was but couldn’t help getting swept up in the setting and the potential after he was told that a $38m budget was covered.
- Luca Sabatini: “Stage / Technical Production” is the credit that Netflix went with. I’m not sure if he was a decision-maker, but he clearly thought that 45 days to set this up was ludicrous.
- Samuel Krost: A 22-year-old who had never booked anything before. [Wait, if booking was such a nasty business, why are you sending a 22-year-old kid to do it?]
- Keith – The pilot/ logistics guy. He comes off like the only one willing to speak truth to power. Of course he was let go early on.
- Grant Margolin – Fyre marketing director who was in over his head. But honestly, other that the fact that what he did was deceitful, he might be the only one who successfully did their job. His efforts led to the festival selling out.
The average concert-goer would be forgiven for buying the hype presented by the Fyre Festival, but any legitimate business person who signed on was, depending on how you view it, either negligent or taken in by an extraordinary conman (McFarlane).
Think about it. The main spokespeople are a slick Millennial who sells “experiences” and a hip-hop star past his prime. The pair was so self-assured that they would toss out their catchphrase “Magic Bird” whenever something went well, intending to invoke how Erwin “Magic” Johnson and Larry Bird brought to the NBA to a new level in the 1980s and repeatedly offering the toast to
Livin’ Like Movie Stars
Partyin’ Like Rock Stars &
Fuckin’ Like Porn Stars!
Yeah. There was no way this was going to be successful.
Weinstein even discusses how people laughed when Fyre was announced at a festival conference in Las Vegas. But that didn’t stop him from signing on with 30% of his fee up front.
SO WHAT COULD HAVE BEEN DONE TO SAVE FYRE?
Honestly, not much. Publicly committing to such an ambitious venture with only 5 months to make it a reality is irresponsible, to say the least.
To put this in perspective, we have a new stadium on our campus. It has never hosted a music event. It only took one meeting for a handful of students and administrators to decide that at least a year of planning and study was required to make the concert safe and successful.
And that’s a stadium in a college town, not a private island…
LOCATION, LOCATION, LOCATION
Putting on concerts requires a lot of stuff. A concert in our 5,000-7,000 seat arena usually involves at least one 18-wheeled tractor trailer and two 50-foot box trucks, plus vehicles for all of the crew and artists.
The Fyre Festival obviously involved a much higher caliber of talent than a college concert, so it would have required a vast amount of gear. And instead of driving down I-95, they had to bring it all to AN ISLAND.
If you’ve ever been to the Bahamas or the Hawaiian Islands, you likely noticed that just about everything was more expensive than it is on the mainland. That’s because just about everything that is used on the island has to be shipped there. Add this all together, and you get an expensive logistical nightmare.
SPEAKING OF THE ISLAND
Is it sexy to party on what used to be Pablo Escobar’s private island? Sure… If you’re under 35 years old and you don’t know all the terrible things he was responsible for.
That’s probably why the owners of Norman’s Cay (where the festival was originally going to take place) made it clear that the festival couldn’t reference Escobar in their promotions.
But what did Fyre do? They name-checked the drug lord in the first advertisement.
You know what happens when you violate a contract so blatantly? You lose. McFarlane and company had to find a new site and start the process all over again. Ooops.
HAD SANER HEADS PREVAILED
Let’s pretend that losing Norman’s Cay as a location led to a moment of sober reflection. There was a way out. Every contract with the artists probably had cancellation clauses. Would that have cost Fyre money? Yes. Would it have been the end of the world? No.
Years ago SCOPE had a concert that had been billed as a co-headline show. One of the two bands signed on and the other didn’t. SCOPE did the best they could to sell tickets, but there was a time when it looked like they were going to have a complete failure on their hands.
Part of my job was to bring them together for a conversation about which was the better outcome: pay the artist their fee and walk away, or continue with the show and have to pay ALL the costs of the concert and hope enough people attend to hit their numbers.
The students decided to go for it and, thankfully, it worked out. But at least the conversation happened and it was serious.
WHY FYRE COULDN’T CANCEL
In the case of Fyre, so much money had already been spent that the only way to recoup any of the investors’ money was to actually have the festival. There’s another reason why the festival went forward.
To save face.
Which backfired.
Hard.
Fyre was made on social media and it was too afraid to die on social media.
The Netflix special includes a telling moment. It’s less than a week out from the festival, and Andy King is claiming that no one talks about the bad parts of Woodstock: the abandoned cars on the New York Throughway, the lack of food and water, the drug overdoses, the mud…
It was at this point that I realized this team didn’t have a grasp on reality.
I know someone who was at Woodstock. Every year in August he posts a photo and often recounts how he and his friend found a can of beans on the last day, which was the first thing they had eaten in a while. People who were there talk about the bad parts of Woodstock.
It’s the people who weren’t there who only talk about the good parts. Their “experience” of Woodstock is based on watching the legendary performances by Joe Cocker, Jimi Hendrix and Crosby, Stills, Nash and (off-camera) Young on TV.
MEANWHILE… BACK IN REALITY
Reputable shows thrive on open, honest, and timely communication.
At my university, all the major players meet weekly from the point of contract (or before) until the day of the show. These meetings are documented and minutes are circulated.
If there’s even a chance of a life safety issue coming up, it is discussed and worked on until it is resolved — or there is no concert.
Remember the Fyre Festival pilot/logistics guy, Keith? He had it right. He was arguably the least qualified person, from a resume perspective, to be involved in putting on an event of this magnitude, but he understood that if there are not enough toilets, it won’t work.
The look on his face when he finds out that his plan to bring in a cruise ship for basic sanitation was being tossed aside is hard to forget. It’s a look that conveys a stab in the back and fear for the safety of unknown others.
Keith was asked to step back from the project, which probably helps him sleep at night.
COMMUNICATION WITH THE AUDIENCE:
A crowd will put up with a lot IF they feel like they know what is going on and are being treated fairly.
Timely pre-show messaging on event details such as arrival times, rules, and expectations are the difference between having an audience that is disappointed but supportive and an audience that is unstable and potentially violent.
There will always be issues. At my university, one of our support acts missed a plane and we ended up having to go on without one of our major draws. We announced the change before the doors opened so the audience could decide for itself it was going to still come to the show.
King urged McFarland to announce weeks ahead of time that this was no longer going to be a luxury festival. If McFarland had followed that advice, the event may have been an embarrassment rather than a complete disaster.
THE RESULT
By blindly charging on and posting the modern equivalent of Kevin Bacon in Animal House screaming ALL IS WELL! all over social media, Fyre made their own bed.
If they had been honest, it would have taken ALL the influencers that had built the festival’s buzz to coordinate to take the festival down.
Instead, it took one kid with a photo of a cheese sandwich to make the whole world bust out their popcorn and watch as the carnage unfolded live on Twitter and Instagram.