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Fyre Festival

bnt

I don't know if anyone else is following this story, but a good place to catch up is with this NPR report. Basically, a bunch of Millennials paid stupid money to go to a luxury private music festival, organised by Ja Rule on an island in the Bahamas. Blink-182 was going to be there, plus DJs who had done remixes for Middle Eastern royalty! The audience were to be ferried there by chartered plane.

The plane ride was about the only thing that went according to plan. The "luxury accomodations" were disaster relief tents, and the gourmet catering was ham & cheese sandwiches with salad. There was almost no lighting or security. Phone chargers were promised - got to keep up the social medai influencing - but no luck there. Blink-182 pulled out because they weren't happy with the production and safety. People were freaking out and the organisers had to arrange flights home. There was looting, people setting fire to stuff ... it all went a bit Lord Of The Flies out there, for a bit. The NME has social media reports & pictures, here. I haven't even looked at the Reddit yet.

That was this weekend, and the plan was to do that all again next weekend. Really? Meanwhile, a now-deleted tweet raises the possibility that Ja Rule was trolling everyone, or his Twitter account was hacked. Could be faked, too. Either way, some lessons have been learned, ja think?

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seamus

Winterlong wrote: »

You would have to wonder how they got it so wrong? They were raking in the money. Paid in advance. Put on a decent show and rake it in again next year.

They started the whole thing with a tech startup/kickstarter mindset.

In this mindset you come up with a great idea and you sell products that don't even exist yet in order to raise capital that you can use to build those products. In general you fail to deliver that product on time, what you manage to develop is usually a shadow of what you originally envisaged (because technology and/or cost makes it unfeasible) and most people are pretty disappointed except the company founders who've managed to generate a salary for themselves to work on a pet project and then sell to a real company for a million dollars.

This model doesn't work in events. If you promise an event on a particular date, it has to be delivered on that date or not at all. You can't say, "Nah we're not ready yet, maybe in six weeks' time", or "We'll hold the event with a quarter of the bands now, then another quarter of them in six months, and then maybe the final half in two years' time".

The idiots who came up with the idea were used to the "yeah we'll have something ready to go in two months" nodding dogs who get involved in technology and then deliver a fancy screenshot as their "product".

They thought they could do the same with a music festival in a remote location.

There was a blog post by someone who was initially hired to work on it, an experienced guy in the field of event management and arrived two months before the event was to start;

The event advertised a tropical paradise resort location, but they landed on little more than a rocky outcrop which needed several seasons of landscaping work to turn into a resort.
They expected the major things to be in place; everything ordered and ready to go, just needing a crew to organise it. But nope, no accommodation, no food, no infrastructure, no security had been booked. Even the bands that had been signed on had received no booking money yet.

The crew of professionals that had been hired called a meeting and told the organisers that they were tens of millions of dollars short of the amount it would cost to get any kind of festival up and running on time.

In true clueless-startup-entrepreneur style, they decided to go ahead with it anyway and to try and cut costs they fired more than half of the crew and told the rest they were getting a paycut of 30%.

Being professionals, most of them told the organisers to stick it up their holes and left.

And so it was with six weeks to go the organisers had absolutely nothing on which to build a music fesitival. And decided to go ahead anyway.

Edit; Here's the account: http://nymag.com/thecut/2017/04/fyre-festival-exumas-bahamas-disaster.html. The timescales are worse than I said. They hired the crew and flew them out with barely six weeks to go.

fatknacker

How could anyone part with any kind of money for a festival just by looking at a promo video of models jumping into water from various locations?

team_actimel

I've heard a good bit about festival scams in recent years and it is easy to convince people with promos all over social media.

There was to be Ireland's first outdoor EDM festival in Meath last summer and a good few tickets were sold but the organiser cancelled shortly before it was to take place. It turned out the organiser (who goes by different names) has cancelled various music festivals at the last minute and won't give refunds.

Story about it here: http://www.puremzine.com/horizon-music-festival/

Dyr

“Let’s just do it and be legends, man.”

What are the odds the marketing twat who came out with that was from Ireland?

Agile start up wanker from blackrock or something

bnt

So, here we are 18 months later, and we still haven't heard the end of it. There are two separate documentaries about the fiasco fighting for your eyeballs:

Hulu:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ljkaq_he-BU

Netflix:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZ0KNVU2fV0

Organiser Billy McFarland has apologised ... from prison.

ChikiChiki

bnt wrote: »

I don't know if anyone else is following this story, but a good place to catch up is with this NPR report. Basically, a bunch of Millennials paid stupid money to go to a luxury private music festival, organised by Ja Rule on an island in the Bahamas. Blink-182 was going to be there, plus DJs who had done remixes for Middle Eastern royalty! The audience were to be ferried there by chartered plane.

The plane ride was about the only thing that went according to plan. The "luxury accomodations" were disaster relief tents, and the gourmet catering was ham & cheese sandwiches with salad. There was almost no lighting or security. Phone chargers were promised - got to keep up the social medai influencing - but no luck there. Blink-182 pulled out because they weren't happy with the production and safety. People were freaking out and the organisers had to arrange flights home. There was looting, people setting fire to stuff ... it all went a bit Lord Of The Flies out there, for a bit. The NME has social media reports & pictures, here. I haven't even looked at the Reddit yet.

That was this weekend, and the plan was to do that all again next weekend. Really? Meanwhile, a now-deleted tweet raises the possibility that Ja Rule was trolling everyone, or his Twitter account was hacked. Could be faked, too. Either way, some lessons have been learned, ja think?

A documentary about this farce is now up on Netflix called ""Fyre: Greatest party that never happened".

An absolute scam and JaRules tweet is way off the mark if indeed it was him. McFarland is a scumbag who will strike again no doubt.

anewme

Watched it on Netflix last night.

Well worth a watch.

Shows how people can be taken in.

Felt sorry for the lady running the cafe on the island. She lost her life savings 38,500 as she never got paid and was the only one who provided any service on the whole thing. If Ja Rule was any use he’d have given that lady her money back.

Urquell

This is fantastic !