Following an uphill battle made all the more insurmountable by his own missteps, Billy McFarland wants to sell Fyre Festival.
This week, word got out that the Fyre Festival IP would be leveraged to launch a streaming platform — with the caveat that Billy McFarland would still own the event brand itself. That no longer looks to be the convicted fraudster’s plan, as he’s announced that he intends to sell it off entirely.
McFarland insisted in an Instagram post that he’s “poured everything into bringing FYRE back with honesty, transparency, relentless effort, and creativity,” touting the brand as “one of the most powerful attention engines in the world.” Under mounds of PR fluff that framed his next move as a search for collaborators, he finally got to his point: “The best way to accomplish our goals is to sell the FYRE Festival brand, including its trademarks, IP, digital assets, media reach, and cultural capital.”
The statement amounts to little more than a thinly veiled liquidation sale announcement. Fyre Festival 2 was met with nearly universal skepticism when tickets went on sale in February, and things went from bad to worse when plans fell through at not one, but two locations in Mexico. Once McFarland and company finally postponed, he must have had a long-overdue moment of clarity.
The debut 2017 edition of Fyre Festival was advertised via influencer marketing as a boutique festival on the Bahamian Exuma Islands with major music acts on the bill. Would-be attendees arrived to find scarce food and shelter; a photo of a cheese sandwich given to a ticket holder who was promised gourmet cuisine went viral on social media at the time. Billy McFarland served four years in a federal prison on wire fraud charges, and the misadventure was chronicled in documentaries on Netflix and Hulu.
Moral of the story: Grifters gonna grift. Fyre Festival has certainly proved to be an enduring media spectacle, but anyone who acquires the brand looks to inherit all the baggage that comes with it.
