About The Fyre Festival Documentary on Netflix

I just finished watching Netflix's documentary. Nothing new under the sun — if you have anything else to do, you don’t need to waste your time. That being said, there are other worst thing you could watch on Netflix.

Fyre festival was a music festival advertised as the place to be and most importantly, it was endorsed by influencers (which brings us to another issue, trust, but we will develop that on another article) on social media. It turned out to be a total fiasco — which, in retrospect, you could have seen from the beginning. The creator was sentenced to 7 years in jail (for other frauds he has done).

I was in the music business for a while (10 years+) and deal with my share of events and festivals. I once wanted to create a show in a small provincial town where my crew had a fan base. Since no one over there was able to get some things together I went there myself and arranged for a place to happen (signed an official document with a state authority), negotiating a good deal on the sound system, booked a DJ (an American friend who was at that time back in my home country), booked a sponsor, a couple of acts (locally) and some radio promotions — I was also invited on a live radio show over there to promote the event. All this by myself in just a couple of days. (There was no one who was able to get everything together back then over there, but fortunately enough, I inspired someone and now he’s doing really good in organizing all sort of events — bottom line is that if you need to pull out an event, you can call him and he’s going to get you everything you need, and that is thanks to me and what I did back then).

Everything went smoothly until the day of the event. The hall where the event supposed to take place was connected through a restaurant that had booked another party that day — a Majorat, when someone turns 18 and and is legally an adult, and that kind of party is a big deal back home.

And that kid who had his party was a hot shot so all the major and influential people were invited to that gig.

Which was literally in the same place where my gig was happening.

They had another entrance for the hall where I was supposed to do my thing, but that entrance had locks on it and the hallway to that entrance was used to deposit garbage bins. They did not have any keys for the locks and there was no way we could have cleaned the entrance that fast. And since people were starting to show up for the other party-and by seeing some of their faces, I knew that if I was going to go along with my concert, there was going to be trouble on all sides.

So I decided to cancel it.

I paid half of the fees to everyone involved (I was not supposed to do that, I paid out of my own pocket, but some of them — especially the sound guys — were real professionals and I wanted to come back there and have connections) and pulled the plug.

I informed everyone and they were not happy. But I made that executive decision. I did the right thing.

The guy I was talking about earlier asked me if he could try and continue with the show — to pull it together — I said yes, of course, but I won’t get involved. He managed to get some speakers and some mics, but when they tried to get into the concert hall, he realized that it was going to be trouble too, so he gives up.

Now, he’s the man to see for these types of shows there. He owns his own renting equipment firm, has a recording studios and an event planning business.

The moral of the story — is not bad to pull the plug on these types of situations. You’ll have more to gain in the long term.

But the problem with the Fyre festival was also the CEO — and what type of personality he is. I’ve worked under someone like that (fortunately for only 2 months) and yes, the world needs that kind of people, but no, not so many.

He could care less about the user. And he could care less about the money also — because he had and he had other ways of getting them. It’s an addiction like gambling but no one really talks about. It’s the addiction of being in charge, of being the man. In order to be that, you develop certain ways of manipulating people. And that’s what he did.