Burning Man festival fails to sell out for first time since 2011: Is climate change to blame?
For more than a decade, tickets to Burning Man have sold out immediately, often in a matter of minutes. But this year, two weeks are left before the festival kicks off and tickets are still available, raising important questions about the annual desert revelry against the backdrop of issues like climate crisis and economic instability.
About the event;
Burning Man takes place every year in Nevada’s Black Rock desert and began in San Francisco in 1986. Since 2011 the festival has been sold out every time. Tickets to the event are released in tiers with some going on sale at the beginning of the year while the main sale starts around april.
This year on 31st July, the place that has a capacity of 73000, announced a last minute sale of 3000 tickets.
The Burning Man’s project director, Dominique Debucquoy Dodley in a statement said, “Adjusting 2024 sales to reflect recent trends around the world that show last minute ticket buying, and continuing to sell tickets until the maximum Black Rock City population is reached encourages immediacy and makes it easy for people to immerse themselves at the heart of Global Burning Man cultural movement.”
There were ticket cancellations during the global Covid 19 pandemic too during 2019-20. After that there was tremendous heat in 2022 and heavy rains in 2023 that spoiled the event. The last few years have been tough for the organisers.
Apart from concerns about what the low ticket sales could mean for the financial solvency of Burning Man, the low sales is not much of a concern for the organisers. In recent years, the cancellations have been there but there have also been bookings that had resulted in full selling out in a short span of time.
