After the 2016 flop, Fyre Festival could returns

UPDATE 23.08.23 In a video on TikTok posted yesterday, 22 August 2023, festival co-founder Bill McFarland announced that tickets for 'Fyre Festival II' are officially on sale online. According to McFarland, the event will take place in late 2024 in the Caribbean. On the festival's website, a hundred pre-sale tickets are available for $499, while a new batch of tickets soon to be released will cost between $799 and $7,999. «It has been the absolute wildest journey to get here, and it really all started during the seven-month stint in solitary confinement,» said McFarland said about the new edition, referring to the time he spent in solitary confinement in 2020 after participating in a podcast from prison. McFarland was released during the spring of 2022, and ended his house arrest last September.

Fyre Festival, the ill-fated festival on the island of Great Exuma, Bahamas, is about to make a comeback. The announcement was made by co-founder Bill McFarland yesterday, on Twitter, with the phrase «Fyre Festival II is finally happening. Tell me why you should be invited.» McFarland, who conceived the festival in 2016 alongside rapper Ja Rule, was just released from prison after serving six years for wire fraud. 

When McFarland and Ja Rule started advertising Fyre in 2016, they promised a prestigious event, attentive to its participants' every comfort with villas and restaurants run by starred chefs. Daily entry prices were $1,500, and VIP packages were $12,000. On Instagram, a media campaign had enlisted the most famous influencers of the moment to promote the festival, including Kendall Jenner, Bella Hadid, Emily Ratajkowski, and Hailey Bieber, but the big scam behind McFarland and Ja Rule's promises was already being exposed. Investors, unsure of McFarland's unpreparedness, withdrew their funding - with every reason: the entrepreneur had never organized a festival before, having reportedly learned how to rent a stage by doing a couple of Google searches. In the days leading up to the start of Fyre, in April 2017, the 33 artists included in the line-up, including Blink-182, Kaytranada, Tyga, Major Lazer, Disclosure, Migos, Lil Yachty, and Skepta, announced their withdrawal, as did the planned catering company. McFarland had to abandon the luxury villas, as he lacked the funds and time to build them. The festival failed miserably during the first week, also revealing clear shortcomings regarding security measures and the much-anticipated luxury - participants were offered sandwiches in styrofoam containers. Fyre was canceled, and McFarland and Ja Rule, later involved in eight lawsuits, offered attendees refunds or VIP tickets for the future edition, which never happened. 

In 2018, McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison for cyber fraud, while Ja Rule was cleared of a $100 million lawsuit. The following year, two documentaries chronicling the events of the Fyre disaster were produced by Hulu and Netflix, Fyre Fraud and Fyre - The Greatest Party That Never Happened. Mcfarland's Tweet announcing the festival's return was met with mixed reviews, including memes, jokes, and the unexpected support of some in the industry, including festival producer Andy King and entrepreneur Chris Bakke.