Ja Rule's finesse of the Century - Fyre Festival

eddiengambino said:

http://dancingastronaut.com/2017/04/fyre-festivals-founder-speaks-explains-everything-fell-apart/

Today is definitely the toughest day of my life. I’d love the opportunity to go through and tell my story of how we got here and how I see it now and where it’s going.

I was a computer programmer, and after computers, the two things I love most are the ocean and, for some reason, rap music. So these three hobbies of mine somehow led me to meeting my partner, Ja Rule. Together, we became friends and business partners. For us, it was always a battle of pushing the limits. Once we got flying lessons together, we got on these really bad 40-year-old planes and flew from New York to the Bahamas – not really knowing the Bahamas very well – ran out of gas and landed in the Exumas and both of us immediately fell in love.

We started this website and launched this festival marketing campaign. Our festival became a real thing and took [on] a life of its own. Our next step was to book the talent and actually make the music festival. We went out excited, and that’s when a lot of reality and roadblocks hit.

The Exumas didn’t have a really great infrastructure – there wasn’t a great way to get guests in here – we were a little bit ambitious. There wasn’t water or sewage. It was almost like we tried building a city out of nothing and it took almost all of our personal resources to make this happen, and everything we had, to make this festival go on. We thought we were ready and built two different festival sites.

The morning of the festival, a bad storm came in and took down half of our tents and busted water pipes. Guests started to arrive and the most basic function we take for granted in the U.S., we realized, “Wow, we can’t do this.” We were on a rush job to fix everything and guests were arriving and that caused check-in to be delayed. We were overwhelmed and just didn’t have the foresight to solve all these problems.

We made sure all guests got a place to stay and had a really long conversation overnight last night after everyone was housed about what to do next and realized we couldn’t risk the safety challenges. So that was the decision that we made — the first thing for us was making sure all these guests get refunded [and] all the vendors get taken care of. All the guests are going home, the refunds are being processed.

The weather unfortunately delayed flights and made them run into each other in terms of being close to when a lot of people were arriving. That was unfortunately something we had no control of, but it made things unacceptable for guests and we feel bad for it.

We thought we were making timeframes that were correct. We were a little naïve in thinking for the first time we could do this ourselves. Next year, we will definitely start earlier. The reality is, we weren’t experienced enough to keep up.

Everybody who wants to go home is being sent home tonight. Some of the guests who are staying in private homes, we’re asking them to stay longer, if they can. We’re going to take every measure to make this right for everybody now, and make this right for everybody next year, on a large scale.

There will be make-up dates, May 2018 in the U.S., free for everybody who signed up for this festival. We will donate $1.50 [per ticket] to the Bahamian Red Cross. It’ll keep the theme of being on water and beach. It’ll be not just music, but all forms of entertainment. The one change we will make is we will not try to do it ourselves. We will make sure there is infrastructure in place to support us.

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BRUH

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Mr Fongstarr said:

I swear if they advertised it like this, and still had the same acts, I bet some idiots would have gone and still enjoyed the festival. There is a festival called Reggae By The River in Humboldt County and I think they're festival is simple and just random tents and what not.

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whywesteppin said:

$1.50

0.1 cents maximum on every dollar they made

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BallDontLie206 said:

....they really think they can get people to buy tickets for this again

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quise2024 said:

The fact that they sold people on villas, yachts, and mansions when not a nan one of those was even present just screams fowl.

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rck3sactown said:

this is one of the most white privilege apology statements I've ever read

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Mark Antony said:

Lmao at next year. Will probably work again.

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8PM at MSG said:

It's a concentration camp for hipsters

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rrlegend said:

dudes signed up to go to chilligan's island 

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rck3sactown said:

this is one of the most white privilege apology statements I've ever read

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dmbrhs said:

rck3sactown said:

this is one of the most white privilege apology statements I've ever read

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Dude, have you read up on how this guy made his money? He's essentially a scam artist masquerading as a tech bro.

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Much has been made of the fact that Fyre Festival, the luxury music fest turned Lord of the Flies scenario going down in the Bahamas this weekend, was backed in part by Ja Rule. But Ja isn’t solely responsible for the nightmare, and the business history of Billy McFarland, his Fyre Media cofounder, might provide some insights as to what went wrong at the festival.

Fyre Festival, a weekend-long event in the Exuma Islands of the Bahamas, was billed as a “a cultural moment created from a blend of music, art, and food,” with tickets that sold for up to thousands of dollars each. (Read more about it here.) On social media Thursday evening and Friday morning, attendees posted about cancelled flights, limited access to food and water, and nasty-looking cheese sandwiches. Blink-182, one of the top-billed performers, has already dropped out. It’s still not exactly clear what went wrong, but it seems likely that Fyre’s organizers were in way over their heads–a hypothesis that was being put forth in gossip publications like Page Six weeks before the festival even began.

This isn’t McFarland’s first poorly planned venture. The 20-something entrepreneur also founded Magnises, a kind of social club that originally aspired to be the American Express “black card” for millennials. New members paid a $450 entry fee for the privilege of carrying around a credit card-sized slab of shiny black metal in their wallets. But it wasn’t really a credit card: as the New York Times noted in a 2013 piece about Magnises, “It is just a way to dress up your everyday Wells Fargo or Bank of America card. Magnises simply transfers the data from the magnetic strip of that old card onto its blank metal card, like copying a CD, and then the Magnises card can be used in place of the original.” At some point along the way, Magnises nixed the black card idea in favor of an app, transitioned to a $250 annual fee, and got rid of an early provision that allowed members to sign up by referral only.

If not for access to funds, what’s the point of signing up? Magnises promises its members “valuable benefits and members-only offers.” The company’s website currently advertises small discounts on services from startups like Cleanly and Handy, plus a list of past Magnises perks, such as access to reserved tables at the season-opening night of the Southampton nightclub AM last year. Many of the listings on the site are for offers that have already expired.

Earlier this year, Business Insider published a detailed story headlined “Members of a private club for ‘elite’ millennials want their money back.” Based on interviews with seven Magnises members, it alleged that Magnises didn’t quite live up to the top-dollar experience it offered. Members said events they’d purchased tickets to were frequently canceled or rescheduled on very short notice, and that they sometimes received unwanted charges on their credit cards that took multiple weeks to be refunded. One member’s story, via Business Insider:

One former member, who also spoke on condition of anonymity, said that they bought several tickets for several events — including Beyoncé’s concert at Citi Field, one of Adele’s shows at Madison Square Garden, and a performance of “Hamilton” — soon after joining Magnises in February 2016.

This member claims to have had logistical issues with nearly every event for which they had purchased tickets. Each time, just before the show (often the day before the event or even the day of) a representative for Magnises would send an email explaining that the startup would no longer be able to provide the purchased ticket and offer to help reschedule the seat for another date.

“They send the same email for every problem, but it’s like fill-in-the-blanks for what the problem is,” the person said.

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In summer 2016, the company began offering private flights to exotic locales. One such trip was to New Orleans, where members would attend a concert by Ashanti and… Ja Rule. A former member named Robert Egan said he booked trips to Cuba and Miami via Magnises, and that after a series of cancellations and rescheduled flights, he came to believe that the company had not even secured the necessary visas to travel to Cuba. He ended up taking neither of the trips, and the experience prompted him to cancel his membership.

Based on testimony from Magnises members and Frye attendees, it sounds like each business operated on a similar model: promote an aspirational lifestyle of glitz and exclusivity, charge a lot of money membership, and fail to deliver on the promised experience. We look forward to seeing whatever scheme McFarland comes up with next.

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sharpshooter718 said:

I'd go next year just to experience the lulz....

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Hyper said:

I'll come break bread sandwiches w/ you, bruh.

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sckid20 said:

View media item 2418941

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