From early spring until the fall begins is music festival season. Between the Governors Ball Music Festival in New York City, the Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival in California, Boston Calling in our own city and many more, music lovers have a lot of options to choose from. Each year, festivals become more focused on the amenities and festival-goers become increasingly extra.
This year, a culmination of flower crowns, kimonos and the most notable celebrities was brought forward with Fyre Festival, a music festival on an island in the Bahamas. However, things didn’t go as planned. Advertisements claimed that for the small sum of $1,200, Fyre Festival-goers could have the ultimate experience of partying with their favorite celebrities on their own private beach. Bella Hadid, Kendall Jenner and friends were featured in a promo video of yachts, bikinis and wild beach pigs to create an ideal scene.
Reports from this remote island show that creator Ja Rule is the king of false advertisement. Instead of morning yoga, meditation and luxury rooms, guests were met with shabby tents and cold cheese sandwiches. Needless to say, people that spend thousands of dollars to party with Major Lazer were pretty upset.
Music festivals nowadays are increasingly about the experience, the outfits, the people and the Instagram pictures. At this point, artists supply the background music for days of partying. This festival in particular is the enigma of what’s wrong with the music festival culture. Expensive price tags and luxury commodities become nicer and it seems more like a vacation than anything else. While headliners are good incentives, what you’re wearing and what friends you’re bringing is the main conversation. Millennials crave the experience, to be like the celebrities they see all over social media, and they’ll pay a lot of money for it.
The organizers of Fyre Festival should’ve canceled this event long before guests boarded their planes, perhaps even before they packed their suitcases. Pictures of sad tents and unoccupied stands that littered social media and news outlets proved that these organizers were not prepared. While Blink-182 seemed to know that something was off, guests were left in the dark. They arrived expecting a beautiful venue and arrived to flimsy fold-up chairs and empty dirt lots.
It’s surprising that Fyre Festival organizers thought they could get away with this without repercussions. Now that Ja Rule and others involved in organizing the festival are being sued, their mistakes have come back to bite them. Festival-goers spent a lot of money and walked away, or were shooed out, without seeing a single artist. It almost seems like a prank gone wrong. Some are calling it a scam, but with plans to reschedule the festival to 2018, perhaps these organizers just really didn’t know what they were getting themselves into.
As college students, we should take Fyre Festival as a warning. The festival used popular, young models to attract a specific crowd of millennials. They sold this lifestyle pretty well, but why do we still buy into it? Festival-goers want a good time, to do something cool and interesting, but without the intentions of going for the music. Instead, they want to live (or post) a temporary lifestyle. In the same way, Fyre Festival promoted a lifestyle that was simply a lie. Fyre Festival is a good lesson that if you spend a lot of money on something for the image, you’re not going to wind up happy.
