Billy McFarland appears to have finally entered the most suitably stupid and funny endgame stage of the Fyre Festival saga, one worthy of the dilapidated tents and cheese sandwiches that launched this whole mess all those years ago. He’s selling the rights to the brand on eBay.
Earlier this year, after the convicted fraudster unsurprisingly failed to get Fyre Fest II off the ground, McFarland appeared to recognize that, perhaps, the problem was him. He revealed that he would step back from the brand, put it up for sale, and “allow a new team to move forward independently,” as McFarland said back in April.
A buyer stepped forward quickly, with Shawn Rech — a documentary filmmaker and co-founder of the TruBlu streaming service with To Catch a Predator’s Chris Hansen — striking a deal for some of the Fyre Fest trademarks to launch a music streaming service, broadcast channel, and app.
That still left a chunk of the brand up for grabs, this one primarily pertaining to what Fyre Fest is most infamous for: Live events. In an Instagram video yesterday (July 7), McFarland claimed that he was on the cusp of closing a “seven-figure deal for the complete Fyre brand IP package” — until it fell through. He did not say who the prospective buyer was.
Rech, in an email to Rolling Stone, confirmed that his deal with McFarland is “complete,” adding, “We had (and still apparently have) the option to buy the rights to host a Fyre Festival, but that’s not a priority right now. Billy tried to carve out a deal on the festival only, and I guess that fell through.”
Nevertheless, relentless salesman that he is, McFarland persisted. This afternoon, he dropped a new video on Instagram insisting he had come up with his “craziest” plan yet: “Today I am taking the most famous festival brand, Fyre Festival, and putting it up for auction on eBay starting at one cent.” (As crazy as this is, we still think faking your way through the creation of a luxury destination festival in the Bahamas and then spending a few years in prison as a result is crazier.)
In the video, McFarland went on to claim that he’s had “over 1,000 offers for the Fyre brand.” But clearly none have passed his refined sniff test because, as he put it, “I am done playing games.”
He went on to tout the more than “32 billion impressions” Fyre Fest has generated online since 2017 (all of them extremely positive and non-controversial, right? Right?). And he insisted that the owner of the Fyre brand would “have an attention engine to launch festivals, do merch collabs, do pop-ups, run livestreams, or build a media brand.”
As noted in the eBay listing (which, believe it or not, is real), the sale includes carve-outs for the parts of the Fyre brand Rech has already purchased, like the Fyre Music streaming platform and “a free ad-supported and broadcast TV platform.” There’s an additional carve-out for a Fyre Fest “theater project,” ostensibly referring to a Broadway musical that McFarland insisted was in development a few years ago.
“These carve-outs are clearly defined and non-competitive with live events, merch, festivals, CPG [consumer packaged goods], or media extensions,” the eBay description states.
As of publication Tuesday afternoon, 71 bidders have pushed the price of the Fyre Fest brand from 1 cent to $50,200. There’s still a week left to place a bid (if you dare), with the sale slated to end next Tuesday, July 14, at 12:44 p.m. ET.
