Billy McFarland has revealed he is now selling the brand rights to the controversial Fyre Festival on eBay.
The owner and founder of the event has been trying to sell the branding, IP and assets associated with Fyre Fest for several months, with an alleged seven-figure deal having recently fallen through.
“We had a seven-figure deal for the complete Fyre brand and IP package that fell through this morning,” convicted fraudster McFarland explained in a post earlier this month. “But now, the opportunity to own the Fyre brand is back on the table.”
He has since revealed how members of the public can purchase the rights to the branding – by bidding for it on the online marketplace eBay.
In an Instagram post, he said the decision was “the craziest thing I’ve ever done”, and at time of writing, bids for the “iconic brand, trademarks, IP, social media assets and more” for Fyre Festival have reached $211,600 (£157,000) – see the auction here.
The news that McFarland was looking into selling the FYRE Fest IP came shortly after he announced the unsurprising indefinite postponement of FYRE Festival 2 earlier this spring.
FYRE Fest 2 was originally set to run between May 30 and June 2 on an island in Mexico, before the tourism board and local officials claimed that no such festival existed.
The original FYRE Festival was first developed by McFarland eight years ago, and was planned to run over two weekends on a private beach in the Bahamas. That edition in 2017 was reportedly set to include performances from Blink-182, Major Lazer, Disclosure, Migos, Pusha T, Tyga and more.
It made headlines when it was revealed to be fraudulent, with punters arriving on the scene and facing inadequate conditions and a lack of food and water. The ordeal was then captured in the now-iconic Netflix documentary FYRE.
McFarland was sentenced to six years in prison in 2018 for defrauding investors and was released after just four years in 2022.
Back in February, it was announced that the second edition of the festival would be taking place on a tropical island off Cancún, Mexico. However, it was soon revealed that the permit McFarland had obtained only allowed for a 12-hour listening party that must have fewer than 300 people.
Before it was cancelled, the second edition of FYRE Fest saw tickets sell for between $1,400 and $25,000 (£1,081-£19,305), while premium packages were priced as high as $1.1million (£850,000) – despite the debacle around the first edition.
Ahead of the planned second instalment, former Fyre Festival investor Andy King warned of “a lot of red flags” over the event’s planned reboot.
The deal that recently fell though appeared to be one that was announced back in April, when documentarian Shawn Rech revealed that he had acquired some of the FYRE Fest brand’s IP and was planning to launch a streaming service using the name. In May, it was revealed that the FYRE Festival brand was looking to launch a hotel experience later this year, marketed as a Caribbean getaway in Honduras in September.
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