The doomed festival’s founder Billy McFarland said the brand can be purchased, but one Northeastern expert said it’s “poisonous.”
First, there was Fyre Fest. Then there was the fallout and documentaries. Then there was Fyre Fest 2 and that postponement.
Now there could be a new chapter for the doomed music festival as founder Billy McFarland announced last week that the brand is up for sale. Anyone who is willing to take a chance on the brand can make an offer through a form on Fyre Fest’s website.
“This brand is bigger than any one person and bigger than what I’m able to lead on my own,” McFarland wrote in a statement on Fyre Fest’s website. “It’s a movement. And it deserves a team with the scale, experience, and infrastructure to realize its potential.”
Could someone purchase the Fyre Fest brand and revive it? It would be a difficult endeavor, said Andrew Mall, associate professor of music at Northeastern University.
“Fyre Fest is a poisonous brand,” he said. “(They have) a history of events that don’t happen. … Maybe the brand itself does have value, but … I don’t think that a different organization can launch a successful event using that brand.”
Fyre Fest became part of the cultural lexicon in April 2017 when the luxurious music festival in the Bahamas the brand advertised to customers turned out to be a disaster, thanks to the lack of lodging, bathrooms and music. McFarland ended up serving six years in prison on wire fraud charges related to the festival.
After being released from prison, McFarland announced in 2023 his plans for Fyre Festival 2, held on Isla Mujeres in Quintana Roo, Mexico, in April. Tickets went on sale in February, but buyers received a message the month of the festival saying it had been postponed and they would be refunded.
Mexican officials said there was no event with that name happening there, but McFarland shared screenshots of conversations and permits from the city of Playa del Carmen, showing they were working with them on an event.
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“I think that officials there got cold feet and did their best to walk everything back, which is kind of understandable,” Mall said. “Playa del Carmen has a vested interest in promoting itself as a tourist destination, so if it becomes synonymous with this poisonous brand, that could harm the broader tourism economy.”
It was unclear who would be playing the festival. It isn’t uncommon for reputable festivals to sell tickets before announcing a lineup, Mall said. But in this case, he said, Fyre Fest’s reputation for failed events probably made artists hesitant to commit.
As proven from the road bumps McFarland encountered trying to plan the second iteration, Fyre Fest has a poor reputation. But could someone buy it and turn it around?
“My impression is that the brand isn’t something that can sell people on an event,” said Mall. “The history of the brand is events that don’t happen. It’s really similar to how we probably shouldn’t expect the Woodstock brand to ever again be revived because Woodstock 50 had so many problems.”
But there are several ways this could pan out, Mall said. Someone could see the value in the failure of the brand and utilize that for satire or comedy. It could also be bought and sold to people making its history part of its schtick.
“It could be an event that really does play on the idea of disaster,” Mall said. “Like an escape room premise, but in some beautiful destination where you arrive knowing you’re going to be roughing it to a certain degree and part of the attraction is encountering these obstacles and dealing with them … like ‘Survivor’ or something like that. Then at the end, there’s this amazing event with wonderful food and so on.”
But a sale could also pose issues with legal liability and it could be difficult for a buyer to profit off it, Mall added.
“How did Billy McFarland become convinced that this whole brand is actually something that other people would want?” he said. “That is what boggles my mind.”