Fyre Festival Returns, Presale Tickets Already Sold Out

Few festivals are quite as infamous as Billy McFarland’s Fyre Festival, where those who bought tickets for its inaugural 2017 event were left stranded in the Caribbean. The festival’s performers pulled out, and the event was abruptly canceled after fans started flying in, leaving them without adequate food, water or shelter.

Festivalgoers sued Fyre Fest, and the festival filed for bankruptcy. Billy McFarland, the festival’s promoter, was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018 after pleading guilty to charges of wire fraud, bank fraud and making false statements to federal law enforcement. In 2022, after serving four years of his six-year sentence, McFarland was released from prison. And now, Fyre Festival is returning for round two.

McFarland announced via his Instagram on Sunday that tickets for Fyre Festival 2 are now on sale, and presale tickets for the event have already sold out.

“It has been the absolute wildest journey to get here, and it really all started during a seven-month stint in solitary confinement,” McFarland said on his Instagram page.

Once again, Fyre Festival will head to the Caribbean, with McFarland promising the event will take place some time near the end of 2024. So far, exact dates and a musical lineup have not yet been announced.

After presale tickets sold out on Tuesday, McFarland took to social media again to further explain his reasoning for having a second go at making Fyre Fest happen.

“Since 2016 Fyre has been the most talked about festival in the world,” he said. “We now saw this convert to one of the highest-priced GA pre-sales in the industry.”

This time around, McFarland says revenue from ticket sales “will be held in escrow until the final date is announced.”

After the failed 2017 event, CAA Sports’ Ety Rybak spoke with Pollstar about Fyre Festival approaching CAA as a sales partner.

“The owner’s credibility issues made me believe there was a strong chance it was a lot of smoke and mirrors,” Rybak said. “The only reason to have agreed to work with them is if we believed the festival had staying power for the future. There wasn’t enough reason to believe that would be the case, so we passed.”