Earlier this year, Netflix and Hulu both released their own original documentaries, recounting the viral social media scam that we all know as the Fyre Festival. Despite the competition between Hulu and Netflix and their respective films, both provide us with an interesting take on the festival and all things behind the scenes.
The Fyre fraud all began with Billy McFarland and his thirst for personal success. After a great deal of success with a career in marketing, Billy birthed his very own app, Fyre. The app itself was meant to connect potential performers with event planners, where they could immediately contact an artist and book them through the app. In efforts to market their app, Billy and his team decided to host a music festival. Or at least tried to.
The festival itself was meant represent a Coachella-esque atmosphere with beautiful beaches, celebrity social media influencers, big-name music artists, with villas, yachts and gourmet meals for all the guests. Attendees were expected to pay between $50,000-$250,000 depending on their selected “package,” and they all happily did– but with the expectation that they would be getting a royal treatment for a whopping two-days.
Billy’s vision for this festival was outside of anything that we could have imagined and went above and beyond with his marketing tactics. Teaming up with rapper Ja Rule, Billy began searching for the best location to host this luxurious, celeb-packed festival. They selected the beautiful island of Exuma, Pablo Escobar’s private island in the Bahamas and recruited a variety of people to assist in all of their event planning escapades.
Their biggest push for the festival was through social media endorsement. The producers got a hold of hundreds of social media influencers, including models like Bella Hadid, Hailey Baldwin, and Kendall Jenner.
The models posted pictures of their trip to the Bahamas, along with the widely known orange Fyre tile, continuously tagging the Fyre Festival instagram that blew up overnight. I mean, if Kendall Jenner is posting about a music festival with celebrities, villas, yachts and the beach– you would wanna go, right?
Kendall was actually paid $250,000 for the one Instagram post. Meanwhile the event planners had barely supplied healthy drinking water for its attendees. In hindsight, the festival sounded amazing and that was its biggest problem.
After the endorsement from huge social influencers, along with the widespread interest of the public, the Fyre Festival started to get real. They actually had to start planning and getting the materials they needed to make the festival possible. But of course– that didn’t happen.
When all of the attendees arrived at the island, it was immediately recognized that there was something wrong. There were no villas, but small white tents in their place that were leftover from a hurricane in years past, along with plastic-wrapped mattresses.
There was little to no organization on the island once the festival-goers arrived, and from here, everything went downhill. Minimal food and water was supplied, hence the famous Twitter photo of the oh-so-appetizing cheese “sandwich” and “side salad” that took the place of the luxury meals that were said to be served.
As if this wasn’t bad enough, all of the artists and influencers that the attendees had paid (and were promised) to see were nowhere to be found.
And all of this for what? Billy was arrested a few months after the event for wire fraud and is now serving 6 years in federal prison. On top of that, him and Ja Rule are both banned from the Bahamas for life. Karma’s a bitch isn’t it?