A popular New York music festival is drawing comparisons to the famous concert disasters Astroworld and Fyre Festival, as it degenerated into a potentially deadly situation, with the city vowing to take action after a weekend plagued by overbooking, last-minute cancellations, and logistical failures. Although the Electric Zoo festival, or EZoo for short, is in its 14th year, one concertgoer told Fortune they were terrified at this iteration, while Mayor Eric Adams was more blunt. “The organizers wanted to turn our city into a zoo,” he said on Tuesday. “We will be dealing with them in the next few days based on their behaviors and actions.”
For a decade and a half, the electronic dance music (EDM) festival has typically attracted over 100,000 ravers from the Gen Z and millennial crowd of twenty- and thirtysomethings to Randall’s Island over the Labor Day weekend. Many spend thousands on tickets, travel, accommodations, outfits, food, drinks, and drugs just to hear heavy bass thunder and neon lasers cut through the late summer air. This year’s lineup promised major names from the genre in Deadmau5, Steve Aoki, Major Lazer, and Marshmello, but it was plagued by disasters before it even began.
“Thank God people lived,” said Sam Weisband, a 26-year-old content and playlist curator who attended the festival as a guest of EZoo. “None of these things should’ve happened.”
Organizers canceled the first day of the three-day festival only a few hours before the gates were set to open (eliminating a scheduled show by the Chainsmokers). They announced the decision in an Instagram post, citing “global supply-chain disruptions” that “have prevented us from completing the construction of the main stage in time for Day 1.”
The logistical hurdles came to a head on Sunday night, when the closing-day crowd stormed the security gates after being told the venue was at maximum capacity.
At 6:35 p.m. that day, Electric Zoo organizers told fans, “We have reached our venue’s capacity earlier than anticipated,” in a post on X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter. Electric Zoo oversold the festival’s 42,500-person capacity by 7,000 tickets on Sunday, the New York Police Department estimated.
At the time of this announcement, hordes of people had been waiting in lines outside the venue for hours in the 90-degree heat, including many who had bought tickets in advance. One person posted a TikTok video in which the crowd is heard chanting, “Let us in!”
Soon after, according to videos on social media and attendees, the crowd pushed through the closed entry point, shouting, screaming, and knocking down metal detectors as they ran past security guards. Local news site Gothamist estimated that 1,500 people stormed the gates.
The packed crowds and chaos drew comparisons to the fatal crowd surge at Travis Scott’s 2021 Astroworld Festival in Houston. Others are comparing the entire experience to 2017’s Fyre Festival, a fraudulent music festival that told ticket buyers to expect a luxurious weekend in the Bahamas but instead offered half-built tents and mass disorganization.
One person commented on an Electric Zoo Instagram post: “Ezoo 2023 = Fyre Festival x Astroworld. Good job.”
“Y’all are done. Don’t even bother in 2024. This is fyre festival 2.0,” said another.
‘Fyre Festival 2.0’
Weisband, who has been going to music festivals for 10 years, told Fortune that this festival showed problems from the beginning. At the Mega Mirage, one of the stages located close to a medical tent, the smell was so overpowering that she had to leave, Weisband said. She also described seeing loose bolts and screws strewn on the ground.
On the aesthetic side, Weisband said there was a lot of “sound bleed,” meaning that attendees could hear music from multiple stages while standing in one spot, which Weisband described as being a very jarring sensory experience, especially at a festival the size and scope of Electric Zoo. She also said she thought that the space fenced off for All Access ticketholders was excessive—the venue was already overcrowded from overselling tickets, and the large All Access space exacerbated the crowding in general areas.
One 22-year-old attendee told CBS New York she feared for her life. “I’m scared we’re gonna die,” Jessica Scanio texted her mom. She recalled “looking out over the sea of people, just in front of me and behind me” and thinking, “I don’t know how or if I’m going to get out of here.”
Weisband added that the team of security guards was one of the rudest she’s ever encountered at a festival. Videos posted on social media show guards beating attendees and throwing water at them.
Other videos highlight more issues: The screens at the main stage—which display the accompanying visuals to the music—stopped working in the middle of artists’ sets, water bottle refill stations broke down, and medical tents did not offer earplugs. The event also ran late, opening two hours behind schedule on the second day, following the first-day cancellation. Organizers promised full refunds to ticketholders.
Tens of thousands too many
The festival’s owner, live music entertainment company Avant Gardner, is facing heavy backlash from the EDM community following the disastrous weekend. The company—which also owns a popular venue called the Brooklyn Mirage—bought Electric Zoo’s owner Made Events for $15 million last year, according to Billboard.
This weekend saw 88,000 attendees over capacity, the NYPD later reported. And Avant Gardner has a reputation for overselling shows by as much as 33%, Gothamist reported, citing an independent monitor. Weisband said her personal experiences, including at the Brooklyn Mirage, back up this assessment, adding that shows were overcrowded and felt unsafe. The Brooklyn Mirage has also been under intense scrutiny after two men were found dead after leaving the venue in separate incidents in June and July.
“If people want to have a dance music or festival community where themes of love, connection, and music are all in one place, as they should be for a festival, then you can’t keep supporting Made Events, Avant Gardner—anyone that doesn’t given a single fuck about the people that they’re bringing into these shows,” Weisband said.
She is one of many fans encouraging people to boycott the Mirage and Electric Zoo.
‘I will never go back’
New York City Mayor Eric Adams has promised to take action against Avant Gardner after the weekend’s fiasco. “It’s unfortunate that the organizers wanted to turn our city into a zoo, and we were not going to allow that to happen,” Adams said during a NYPD briefing.
Neither Electric Zoo nor Avant Gardner responded to Fortune’s request for comment, but following Adams’ comments on Tuesday, Electric Zoo issued a statement: “The vast majority of Electric Zoo attendees had a great experience, but our job is to make sure everyone’s experience is phenomenal. We’ll be working closely with our partners to review the planning and execution of the event from start to finish.”
But the damage to the festival’s reputation may be irreversible. People online are calling for the festival to shut down and others have sworn they’ll never return.
“I will never go back to EZoo,” Weisband said. “This was such a massive shitshow.”
