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Billy McFarland has officially auctioned off the intellectual property, trademarks, and assets for Fyre Fest on eBay for a sum of $245,300.
The sale arrives after McFarland’s seven-figure deal to sell Fyre Fest had apparently fallen through earlier this month; in response, the ‘contrepreneur’ (con man + entrepreneur) announced he’d be auctioning off the brand via eBay, with the starting bid being one cent.
That eBay auction was certainly successful for McFarland, who considers Fyre Fest “the most famous festival brand” around. The winner will now receive control of the Fyre Fest brand name, trademarks and intellectual property, social media accounts, marketing materials, and domain names. Plus, they’ll get documentary footage, the option for a Caribbean festival location (which McFarland announced prior to the sale), and email and SMS lists. Meanwhile, some of the Fyre IP had already been sold to documentarian Shawn Rech, who plans to use the name for a new music-focused subscription video-on-demand platform.
“Whoever owns the Fyre brand will have an attention engine to launch festivals, do merch collabs, do insane pop-ups, run livestreams, or build a media brand,” McFarland said when announcing the sale last week. That’s all true, but if you’re the auction winner, beware that you just put $250 grand in that guy‘s pocket — which may not go very far, given that McFarland has confessed to still owing $26 million to the initial Fyre investors.
English (US) · 