After a couple of attempts, nobody has ever successfully staged a Fyre Fest event. The first Fyre Festival, back in 2017, was an internet-famous boondoggle, a beautiful little fable in which influencer-model types lured a bunch of people out to a Caribbean island for a Blink-182 show that never happened. Instead, they were all stranded in FEMA tents, filming everything on their phones, and it turned into two different streaming-service documentaries. The second Fyre Fest was supposed to go down in Mexico next month, despite multiple reports that it simply wasn’t going to happen. Those reports were correct; Fyre Fest 2 has now been indefinitely postponed. So now, it’s apparently going to be a streaming service.
Deadline reports that Fyre Fest founder Billy McFarland has sold off “some of the IP of the event including two trademarks.” That intellectual property is now in the possession of Shawn Rech, a guy who co-founded a streaming service called TruBlue with former To Catch A Predator host Chris Hansen. Rech also started something called American Gospel TV. Rech doesn’t own the Fyre Fest itself, which is supposedly still going to announce a new location, but he’s able to use the name and trademark to launch what appears to be a music-video streaming service. Why would anyone subscribe to a service that’s named after an infamous shitpit of nothingness? Here’s how Rech explains it to Deadline:
Music networks are all just programming now, and I have no interest in watching people slip on bananas. It has nothing to do with music. I needed a big name that people would remember, even if it’s attached to infamy, so that’s why I bought these [trademarks] to start the streaming network… This isn’t about festivals or hype — it’s about putting the power of music discovery back in the hands of the fans. We’re building something authentic and lasting.
The Fyre streaming service plans to launch on Thanksgiving, and it’s already got a fancy-looking website. The site explains, “FYRE Music Streaming is both a subscription Video On Demand (SVOD) app and a Free Ad-Supported Television Network (FAST)… The app works similar to well-known subscription services like Netflix.” Artists will be able to submit their work for consideration, and subscriptions will supposedly cost less than five dollars a month. In the FAQ question, the site says that the streaming network is not affiliated with the music festival: “This is a start-up that secured the rights to use the FYRE brand for streaming, FAST and broadcast.”
This is all deeply confusing and nonsensical, but someone, somewhere is presumably getting paid.
