Fyre Festival promoter Billy McFarland has been a promising a follow-up to the 2017 music festival despite the original’s failings, and today, he announced that not only does Fyre Festival 2 have a venue, but dates have also been selected in 2025. “Fyre Festival II is happening April 25, 2025, so we’re seven and a half months away,” he told The Today Show. “We have a private island off the coast of Mexico in the Caribbean, and we have an incredible production company who’s handling everything from soup to nuts.”
A reminder: Billy McFarland was only recently released from prison over the first Fyre Festival, which did not go well at all. That hasn’t stopped curious, adventurous, and probably suicidally optimistic people from buying up all the pre-sale tickets last year, proving that there really is no such thing as cancel culture. Maybe those music fans truly believe McFarland will deliver, or maybe they’re willing to brave the dangerous conditions that befell the original to have a story to tell — or perhaps an opportunity to make themselves famous by documenting any potential carnage.
Or maybe they just really don’t remember the disaster that was the 2017 Fyre Fest, which left hundreds of would-be concertgoers stranded on an island in the Bahamas without food or water, packed into overcrowded and underprepared campgrounds, and (I think it should be needless to say) defrauded out of thousands in ticket sales for a concert that never happened. Artists the festival organizers claimed had been booked for months revealed they’d never been paid, the government of the Bahamas is still out for McFarland’s hide (and a bunch of money he never paid it), laws were rewritten to govern influencers and advertising on social media, and poor Ja Rule was raked over the coals by the entire internet for like the fourth time in the last 20 years.
Oh, and this guy got famous for what he was willing to do to get those people a container load of water bottles.
Maybe those people who bought tickets should brush up on the events of Fyre Festival 1; there are two different documentaries they can watch.