Fyre Fest attendees win $7,200 in class action settlement, four years after the nightmare festival
Music Features Fyre
We all laughed at the bizarrely apocalyptic footage from Fyre Fest, watching those trust fund kids stranded in The Bahamas with the saddest cheese sandwiches and FEMA tents. Those attendees and their parents lost tons of money with expectations of frolicking with models and seeing Blink-182, instead having their lives turned into an influencer version of Lord Of The Flies. But those who were unlucky enough to have a front row seat to the summer of scam are now getting compensated for their troubles four years later.
Billboard reported that lawyers representing Fyre Fest ticket buyers have reached a settlement awarding attendees with $7,220. It might not seem like too much, considering tickets cost between $1,000 and $12,000 (with some accommodations going for as far as $55,000), but at least it’s something. On May 13, there will be a hearing to approve the lawsuit settlement.
This isn’t the first time attendees have been compensated. In 2018, Seth Crossno (who went viral for chronicling his nightmarish experience on Twitter and appeared in Netflix’s FYRE: The Greatest Party That Never Happened) and his friend Mark Thompson won a $5 million lawsuit against Fyre Fest founder Billy McFarland after they each paid around $13,000 for the festival’s VIP passes, flights, and accommodations.
As of now, attendees have their money back, the blowjob guy from the Netflix documentary is making big bucks on Cameo, and McFarland remains in prison. Everyone wins—well, except McFarland.
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Which they will all immediately lose investing in fraudulent NFTs.
But they just really, really wanted to see that Kevin Smith movie.
Owning the “Leave Britney Alone” video sure *seemed* like an airtight investment.
Not to defend morons in general, but it’s not fraud if customers are satisfied with their product.
How can an NFT be fraudulent? Fraud requires that one misrepresent an item’s value. The entire premise of NFTs is that people are willing to pay money for something with no intrinsic value.
So that’s what? $4.87 after the lawyers take their cut?
Exactly why I came to the comment section. Lawyers get an insane percentage from these suits.
tickets cost between $1,000 and $12,000 (with some accommodations going for as far as $55,000)
This whole event has been fascinating to me ever since it was going on, and I think the economics of it (and how those economics are portrayed) is the most interesting part.While most of the headlines at the time of the event focused on the high-end packages, the reality is that most tickets were sold for around $1200 (with some reports of special deals for as little as $500). While $1200 sounds like a lot of money (and it IS a lot of money), we’re talking about at least a week-and-a-half all-inclusive Caribbean vacation here. You can’t finagle $1200 for flights, accommodations, and food for a 10 days in the Bahamas for so little even without a concert lineup and Insta model eye candy hanging around. This was a bargain trip.
The people who attended this festival weren’t the super-wealthy. The super-wealthy would have paid more for their own trip that didn’t include threats of Blink 182 showing up. No, the people who attended this festival were reasonably well-off, but wanted to appear to be super-wealthy — the same demographic who rents the fake private jet photo set to take pictures for Instagram.What I want to know is: Why didn’t the organizers do the math? How did they possibly think they could pull it off by charging so little? Were they hoping to snag a few whales buying up the $55k tickets to subsidize the rest?
Apparently McFarland initially raised the cash with a bunch of short-term loans, meaning that by the time his advisors looked at the actual plans and told him there would need to be far more time to prepare, he couldn’t actually take that time and was forced to plow ahead for any ghost of a chance to pay them back.
That’s right! The whole “cashless” thing where wristbands were loaded up with money was a way for him to get more short-term funding!Imagine having the misplaced self-confidence to say: “I promised hundreds of people luxury villas, gourmet meals, and celebrity entertainment. I have none of those things. All I have are FEMA tents and pathetic cheese sandwiches. Oh well, I might as well still fly these people to a foreign country. I’ll probably figure something out by the time their plane lands.”
“Future Billy can deal with it!”
A few days later: “Damn you, Past Billy!”
Also, the impetus for it was to promote his app, so he may have been thinking that it would create buzz to get more loans.
Some people got the early-bird special of $500, which for 2 weeks in the Bahamas is INSANELY cheap.
Now, $1200 itself is a lot of money, but we’re talking about a week-and-a-half all-inclusive trip to the Caribbean here.No, we’re not.
It was supposed to be two separate weekend-long events, not a week and a half.
And it most definitely was not “all-inclusive”. One of the ways they scammed extra money out of attendees was by having them pre-load wristbands with money to be used for food and beverages during the festival.
I never understood the schadenfreude toward the attendees. For most it was a little bit of a splurge on what could’ve been a pretty epic festival. You spend money to go on vacation. Some were Instagram influencers, but those people are also at the county fair and I don’t root for it to implode. the rest of the responses was assholes assuming other festival goers must be assholes too. It was a fascinating story of failure though.
I never felt schadenfreude for the attendees, but I sure did for the organizers, especially after all the accounts came out from underlings who worked for these bozos. Everyone who has ever worked for a boss who demanded the impossible while ignoring everyone’s expertise was nodding along in understanding.
Because Instagram influencers are tiresome douchebags. It doesn’t mean that they aren’t right to sue, they should have gotten what they paid for, but it’s still kind of funny.
I think the schadenfreude* comes from the way the attendees were portrayed in the news reports on the subject — and I think that portrayal is somewhat unfair.The festival was marketed as an extreme luxury experience with an extremely high price tag, and the reports focused in on that. And that focus grabbed eyeballs because a lot of people love to watch bad things happen to people who have more than they do.The nuance here is that there’s little evidence that anyone bought the super-expensive packages, and most attendees spent about $1200 on their tickets.Now, $1200 itself is a lot of money, but we’re talking about a week-and-a-half all-inclusive trip to the Caribbean here. When an average Disney World trip can cost around $5000, a $1200 Caribbean getaway is a screaming deal.Whether or not it’s right to laugh at rich people having a bad time, the premise is flawed because the Fyre attendees were, by and large, not rich — they were just mostly young people looking to score a bargain vacation who believed the nonsense that was being sold to them.Another problem is the “influencer” angle. The festival was sold as an opportunity for people who are famous on social media for doing little more than simply being pretty, and that’s another group that people love to hate on. Bargain charter vacations have snafus all the time, but you typically don’t hear about them in the news. And that’s really all the Fyre Festival was — a VERY poorly planned bargain charter vacation. The big difference was that most of the attendees had a bunch of followers on social medial, so it got hyped up in advance… and then there was plenty of footage of the meltdown as it was unfolding.
*Incidentally, isn’t it interesting that the German language has a word, schadenfreude, for taking pleasure in someone else’s misfortune while the French language has a word, décolletage, for the perfect amount of a woman’s cleavage? I think this says something about each culture.
Now, $1200 itself is a lot of money, but we’re talking about a week-and-a-half all-inclusive trip to the Caribbean here.No, we’re not.
It was supposed to be two separate weekend-long events, not a week and a half.And it most definitely was not “all-inclusive”. One of the ways they scammed extra money out of attendees was by having them pre-load wristbands with money to be used for food and beverages during the festival.
a pretty epic festivalI’m not sure people would define a festival headlined by Blink-182 as “epic”
Settling with whose money? Ja Rule’s?
Probably, yeah.
If they actually get paid, everyone whose expenses totalled $7,219.99 is happy enough.
Where is the money for this settlement coming from? It’s nice that they’ve reached an agreement but isn’t one of the biggest issues is that the promoter, etc., ran out of cash? Also, have the people who worked at the event gotten paid?