When Fyre Media, founded by Ja Rule and Billy McFarland, announced their first Fyre Festival, it was billed as an unparalleled, first class music festival experience. Likened to a classier Coachella, the event was announced as a “once-in-a-lifetime music experience,” with musical acts such as GOOD Music, Blink 182, and Major Lazer among many others joining the roster. The whole festival was originally announced to take place on a secluded island in the Bahamas, later revealed to be Great Exuma. Guests were offered packages included bungalows of various sizes, ranging from plans just under $2000, all the way to six digit plans. For all intents and purposes, if everything went as promised, the whole festival truly did seem to be a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.

When news of the festival was first announced, it caught our eye as a trending social media topic. The whole event seemed to garner plenty of positive reaction, as well as having some pretty major names attached to it, such as Emily Ratajkowski and Kendall Jenner. Chatter across the web lit up when the festival was originally announced, and only seemed to skyrocket to higher proportions once the lineup was announced.

Earlier on, in order to help promote the festival, Fyre was attempting to put the word out on an event that they were holding in several cities across the US, including Los Angeles, on February 10th. We like to take initiative to source Los Angeles culture that we believe you would be interested in, so we added it to our calendar and reached out for more information. After promoting the event for a short while, we were contacted on February 10th to take down the post, and replace it with a something new they were putting on. The new event was originally to be held at 1 OAK, a prominent night club and friend of the site, now on February 23rd. Up until that point, we had no idea what was going on with their first listing.

It should have probably been a red flag, as things most certainly did not seem to go according to plan once the festival actually took place. The first patch of festival-goers flown out to the island quickly discovered that nothing was quite how originally offered. The food supposedly provided by Steven Starr’s world class catering ended up being nothing more than light kitchen food. A correspondent from Starr catering reached out to us and actually clarified that their agreement with Fyre Festival was terminated on April 2, 2017. Amongst bungalows offered were several tents simply pitched with mattresses inside. A large portion of the infrastructure and staging was not even completed. #FyreFraud and #FyreFestival are rampant with tales of the massively disorganized situation.

Being in the event industry, it sometimes happens that event organizers are not properly prepared for the strenuous work that creating a night away can be. As promoters, we attempt to deliver what we believe are the strongest aspects of Los Angeles culture. We will continue to do our best in the future to bring quality information to your attention, held to the highest standard.

Fyre’s website currently offers a statement, including mention of flying everyone off the island, back home.