Flaming out? Burning Man festival fails to sell out for first time in a decade

For more than a decade, tickets to Burning Man have sold out almost immediately – sometimes in a matter of minutes .

But this year, less than two weeks before the festival kicks off, tickets are still available – raising questions about the future of the annual desert revelry in the face of the climate crisis and economic instability.

Burning Man takes place each year in Nevada’s remote Black Rock desert and began on a San Francisco beach in 1986. It has has sold out each year since 2011, said Alysia Dynamik, executive director of the Generator, a maker space in Reno, Nevada, who has attended the festival since 2010.

Tickets are released in tiers – with some going on sale at the beginning of the year and the main sale starting in April – and are typically quickly snapped up. But things look a bit different this time around: on 31 July, Burning Man, which has a capacity of 73,000, announced a last-minute sale of 3,000 tickets. As of Tuesday, tickets are still available.

“We are pleased to have fulfilled demand for our earlier sales and be in a position to offer greater access to more people as the event nears,” Marian Goodell, CEO of Burning Man Project, said in a press release announcing the “OMG Sale”. “This ticket sale is an exciting opportunity to connect more people interested in Burning Man and the arts and culture.”

Longtime burners cite a difficult few years for the festival and economic uncertainty in explaining the slow ticket sales this year. First, there were cancellations in 2020 and 2021 due to the Covid-19 pandemic. Then came record-setting temperatures in 2022, and heavy rains in 2023 that turned the playa into mud, leaving revellers trapped for days.

“The last few years have been tough for weather and being able to properly plan,” said Kaden Sinclair, president of the Idaho Burners Alliance, which operates the Xanadu maker space in Boise. He named soaring temperatures, which make it difficult to enjoy the event “when it is an inferno”. Sinclair has attended Burning Man 14 times since 2004, but will not be attending this year.

“The rain last year got a lot of people freaked out about it,” said Dynamik, who noted that although the weather did make it difficult for people to leave the event, it wasn’t as terrible on the ground as was reported from outside the festival.

Although weather has been front of mind in past years, Sinclair suspects that another factor has dampened sales this year.

“With food and housing making more immediate concerns a priority, many are choosing to skip a year or two in order to solidify their living situation,” said Sinclair. Tickets to Burning Man start at $575, but, Sinclair says, costs can be much higher than that for many participants: “Many of us greatly enjoy bringing large art. That is almost entirely self-funded and can cost tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

Aside from concerns about what low ticket sales could mean for the financial solvency of Burning Man, Dynamik doesn’t think that the festival failing to sell out is necessarily a bad thing. In recent years, Burning Man’s attendance has surged as wealthy festivalgoers , not all as committed as longtime burners to the festival’s principles of “radical self-reliance” and “de-commodification”, pack the playa.

“As someone who’s been going since before it started selling out, there has been a lot of perceptions around the way that creates a scarcity model,” creating a sense of exclusivity, she said. “I think culturally, most people don’t necessarily feel like it’s a bad thing for it to revert to pre-scarcity.”

• This article was amended on 14 August 2024. It previously stated that Burning Man has been held in Nevada’s Black Rock desert since 1986. The festival actually first began on a San Francisco beach in 1986.