BURNING MAN
Why have Burning Man 2024 tickets not sold out for the first time in more than a decade?
Both the 2022 and 2023 editions of the annual festival held in the Nevada desert were hampered by inclement weather.
Iconic annual music festivals such as Coachella and Lollapalooza have struggled with ticket sales this year and the key factor at play according to various news outlets and analysts are economic factors.
Festival going is an expensive business and this is being cited as one of the reasons that the 2024 Burning Man Festival has failed to sell-out for the first time in a decade.
Founded in 1986 in San Francisco, Burning Man moved to the Nevada desert in 1990 and in recent years, the event has typically drawn around 80,000 people, according to the organization.
The festival is a week-long large-scale desert event focused on “community, art, self-expression, and self-reliance” held annually and since 1991 has been staged at Black Rock City in Nevada.
The event’s name comes from its culminating ceremony: the symbolic burning of a large wooden effigy, referred to as the Man, that occurs on the penultimate night, the Saturday evening before Labor Day with the organisers citing the ten values and principles that underpin the festival: radical inclusion, gifting, decommodification, radical self-reliance, radical self-expression, communal effort, civic responsibility, leaving no trace, participation, and immediacy.
Burning Man has since evolved into a destination for social media influencers, celebrities and the Silicon Valley elite with the likes of Amazon.com founder Jeff Bezos, Google cofounder Larry Page, and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg all recent attendees.
Weather hampers previous editions
In 2022, temperatures in the Nevada desert exceeded 100 degrees Fahrenheit during the course of the festival generating heat-related problems with little shahed area available for festival goers and in 2023, intense rainfall led to the closure of the main road to the festival’s entrance, leaving attendees stranded at the site for days.
Despite sluggish pre-festival sales, the organisers are bullish claiming that they anticipate a surge of last minute ticket sales and have made tickets available to non-registered guests but it would be an optimist who would suggest the festival fulfills it’s 80,000 capacity crowd this year.