For the first time in 18 years, Eric Baron is not sure if he will be able to get a ticket to Burning Man. The owner of the Melting Pot World Emporium in Reno, Baron has been an active participant in the counter-culture festival, taking part in an elaborate theme camp, the Midnight Popcorn Palace, for the last seven years. But due to Burning Man’s new ticketing system, which changed this year from a first-come, first-serve queue to a lottery, not only has the Melting Pot’s 13-year run as a Burning Man ticket outlet come to an end, but Baron is currently empty-handed. And he’s not happy about it.
‘I think it was not the best choice for the population dilemma,’ said Baron. ‘It was not the best solution.’
Baron joins the ranks of thousands of other veteran Burners and newbies who are upset over Burning Man’s decision to switch to a lottery. Only a portion of the large groups that produce the massive and intricate art projects and collaborations that make up the core of Burning Man were able to secure tickets, leaving many of these projects in jeopardy. Lottery critics also say it creates winners and losers, violating one of the festival’s core tenets of radical inclusion. While Burning Man recently took steps to fix some of the biggest problems created by the lottery, organizers say there’s no way to resolve the largest issue: demand now far exceeds supply.
After Burning Man sold out last year for the first time ever in its 25-year history (the Bureau of Land Management started limiting the event to 50,000 people in 2011), organizers realized they had to change the ticketing system. On top of selling out, thousands of people were spending six to eight hours in front of their computers while they waited ‘in line’ for tickets, crashing Burning Man’s servers. But the switch to a lottery system ended up having unforeseen consequences — Burning Man estimates that only 25 to 30 percent of the people needed to build theme camps, art cars, and art projects have secured tickets.
‘The random draw of the main sale left inordinate large numbers of our core contributors … without tickets, ‘ wrote Marion Goodell, a founding member of Black Rock City LLC and Burning Man’s director of business and communications, in a blog post this month. ‘In fact, the ratio was so unexpectedly large it has punched significant holes in Black Rock City’s artistic, civic, and functional infrastructure, putting the integrity of the event itself at risk.’
Kings Beach resident John Staab, who failed to get tickets in the lottery for what he was hoping would be his 10th Burning Man, is worried that his art project is at risk. The elaborate bike course that he and five other people build, which includes wooden boardwalks, teeter-totters, and a five-foot high wooden mound, takes months of preparation and work to create. Out of his 22-person camp, which includes the six volunteers who build the bike course, Staab only knows of one person that secured a ticket in the lottery.
‘They [Burning Man organizers] needed to do something, I understand why, it’s been a mess to try and get tickets online,’ said Staab. ‘But our project is in danger. If people don’t have tickets, they are not going to spend extra money on a project that they can’t be involved with. If there are just a few of us, we’ll still do the project but on a much smaller scale.’
If many Burning Man veterans did not get tickets, then who did? From a survey that Burning Man conducted when people registered for the lottery, the organization discovered that about 40 percent of tickets buyers were first time Burners. While not a bad thing to have Burning Man virgins making up a large portion of participants, people like Staab and Baron say it will change the character of the festival.
‘If it’s all new people, there won’t be a lot of elaborate camps,’ said Staab. ‘It’s definitely going to be different. It might not be as elaborate as before, but Burning Man is always changing.’
Due to the uproar created by the lottery system, Burning Man announced on Feb. 15 its solution to the problem. It will take the remaining 10,000 tickets that were slated to be sold the old-fashioned way in a secondary main sale at the end of March and issue them to theme camps and art projects with a long history at the event. It will also launch the Secure Ticket Exchange Program (STEP) on Feb. 29 where people can sell any extra or no-longer-needed tickets they got in the lottery. Only people who did not get tickets in the main sale lottery are eligible for STEP.
Staab has mixed feelings about Burning Man’s attempt to resolve the ticket debacle.
‘On one hand it’s good because I now have a better chance to get tickets for the camp,’ he said, ‘but some people think Burning Man is getting exclusive.’
And what about those people who want to go but don’t belong to an art camp or are ineligible for STEP? Looks like they are pretty much S.O.L.
‘If you didn’t sign up for the lottery, unless you want to go buy one on eBay, you don’t have any chance of getting tickets at face value,’ said Staab, who saw Burning Man tickets going for $1,500 on StubHub, around four times the original price.
While some people are so upset over the Burning Man ticket fiasco they say they will boycott the event, and even Staab and Baron say they might opt for the beach or travel instead, everyone realizes that the festival has grown in popularity to such an extent over the last few years that it is no longer possible to include everyone. This year, Burning Man had three times the number of tickets requested than were available, and the event was already having traffic problems, with cars backed up for eight to ten hours on the first and last day of the week-long event.
‘Burning Man can’t just keep printing tickets,’ said Baron. ‘They have really outgrown their container.’
As Goodell wrote, ‘There’s no way to sugarcoat this: the hard truth is that there are a lot of you who want to come to Black Rock City … this year, but not everyone will be able to attend.’
