Billy McFarland is forging ahead with a sequel to the infamous Fyre Festival fiasco.
The event’s founder was notoriously convicted in relation to his involvement in defrauding investors and luring ticket-holders to the Bahamas in 2017 for a luxury music festival that turned out to be anything but.
Despite serving almost four years out of a six-year prison sentence, McFarland is organising another — and he claims he just sold out the presale tickets.
“The first Fyre Festival II drop has sold out,” he announced Tuesday on X, the platform formerly known as Twitter.
“Since 2016 Fyre has been the most talked about festival in the world. We now saw this convert to one of the highest priced GA pre-sales in the industry.”
According to the website, ticket prices for the 2024 event range from $499 (£392) to $7,999 (£6292).
While McFarland claims to have no intentions of repeating the festival’s inaugural disaster, his second attempt at the Fyre Festival was purportedly hatched behind bars.
“It has been the absolute wildest journey to get here, and it really all started during a seventh-month stint in solitary confinement,” McFarland claimed Sunday.
“I wrote out this 50-page plan of how it would take this overall interest … to make the impossible happen.”
McFarland said he approached “people as far away as the Middle East and South America” before once again settling on the Caribbean. He added that “the best” infrastructure will be in place this time and that “all ticket sales will be held in escrow” until an official date.
The original festival appeared too good to be true — and was proven a debacle.
After being promised a glamorous weekend with luxury accommodations on the island of Great Exuma and concerts by artists like Blink-182, ticket-holders — who reportedly spent between $5,000 (£3,933) and $250,000 (£196,642) — were treated to tents, cheese sandwiches and chaos.
Hulu and Netflix documentaries later chronicled McFarland’s dwindling lack of funds and harried attempts to forge ahead as the walls were closing in. He later pleaded guilty to wire fraud, bank fraud and making false statements to federal law enforcement and was sentenced in 2018 to six years in prison but was released early in 2022.
“I let people down,” McFarland said on Good Morning America in November. “I let down employees. I let down their families. I let down investors. So, I need to apologise. I’m wrong, and it’s bad.”
However, the New Yorker is moving forward with another attempt. He also announced in his video that he’s even working on a documentary called After The Fyre — and a purported Broadway musical about the original ill-fated festival.
While a successful Fyre Festival II would benefit local tourism and deliver him much-needed redemption, it remains to be seen how McFarland’s event pans out. If the lack of quality of most sequels is any indication, however, the odds are certainly stacked against him.