Fraudulent Music Festival Gives Fyre Fest a Run for Its Money

XO Music Festival stared Fyre Fest square in the eyes, said "Hold my beer," then proceeded to fyre up the f*ckery. With Vanilla Ice listed as an alleged headliner, where else could they possibly have gone wrong?

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Image via Getty/Andrew Chin
vanilla ice

Remember Fyre Fest? LMAO.

Now, thanks to a Rolling Stonereport, we have another act of alleged music festival deception to marvel at. Something called the XO Music Festival (no relation to the Weeknd) was supposed to be going down starting Friday in Antioch, California. Headliners—at least allegedly—were set to include Ludacris, T.I., Funk Flex, Mistah F.A.B., and Vanilla Ice, pictured above doing something I can't fully comprehend.

Despite a typo-laden message shared to the festival's Instagram account Wednesday that Trumpishly took aim at so-called "fake news," the festival has in fact been called off due to a variety of seemingly Fyre-esque reasons.

"Due to the promoters lack of fulfilling contractual obligations between the Contra Costa Event Park and World Class Entertainment, Event Park Management in the best interest and safety of our facility, event attendees, and the City of Antioch have no choice but to cancel the XO Music Festival scheduled to take place at the Event Park July 12 – 15, 2018," a venue rep said in a statement Wednesday.

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Jim Hudson, who booked Madison Hudson for the fest, told Stone there's been "nothing but fraud" surrounding the $375 to $2,495 ticket-range event. XO Fest promoter Sami Habib, for example, was recently arrested for some sort of real estate scam. When Hudson later canceled, XO ignored them and kept using the artist's name on flyers and other promotional materials. Some have even joked that XO will go down as "the Bay Area's Fyre Fest," a tall order no doubt, but possibly a spot-on assessment. 

Sirius XM, listed as a backer on the official festival website, says they never made any kind of sponsorship agreement with organizers. Additionally, Luda appears to have been scheduled for a completely different festival this weekend, to which XO had the audacity to claim was simply a matter of Luda not knowing his own schedule.

Anyway, read the full report here. More details will most certainly be coming soon. In the meantime, anyone want to start a music festival with me?

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