As ticket sales fade, is the Burning Man music festival losing its spark?

Demand for tickets at Burning Man — the notorious Nevada desert festival beloved by Silicon Valley elites — has cooled, with the event failing to sell out for the first time in years.
The festival usually attracts artists, activists and revellers, known as Burners, to a sprawling stretch of the Black Rock Desert for a week of uninhibited celebration.
Free love and drugs are said to be warmly embraced among the hedonistic crowd and each year reports of an “Orgy Dome” raise eyebrows among those unfamiliar with the festival’s excesses.
Elon Musk has described Burning Man as “incredible” while Mark Zuckerberg once served grilled cheese sandwiches amid the tents and art installations.
Last year, however, it was struck by freak weather with a fierce rainstorm leaving Burners to trudge through ankle-deep mud, leaving some trapped for days.
That experience may have left a bad taste and could partially explain why tickets for this year, beginning on August 25, are yet to sell out.
As late as this week tickets were offered on the website for $575, plus a $55 servicing fee, while $1,500 tickets were also still available.
Organisers suggested the slow sales reflected a wider trend across live events of revellers buying at the last minute. An uncertain economy may also be playing a part.
Some veteran Burners, however, fear the festival has lost its spark.
Burning Man was launched by a group of artists in San Francisco in 1986, bu in recent years there have been grumblings that the crowd was changing and the event was drifting from the ethos that made it great.
“Leaving no trace” is “arguably Burning Man’s most important principle” according to its website but attendees say more and more rubbish has been left at Black Rock recently.
Itai Isenberg, a musician who serves as a musical director of different camps at Burning Man, has been attending the festival since 2016. He fears the event is losing touch with its roots.
“It became the cool thing and then everybody wanted to be at the cool thing and they weren’t necessarily coming for the core values or community,” he said.
Burning Man lists ten principles on its website, including decommodification, civil responsibility and participation.
Isenberg wonders whether newer visitors are as wedded to these ideals as veterans.
“Burning Man was founded on everybody being a participant, on everybody gifting.
“And in the past two or three years, it has become more and more spectators or people who are just buying a ticket for the weekend, what someone referred to as ‘weekend warriors’.”
There have been complaints about the increasing number of ultra-wealthy Burners attending an event which is supposed to be countercultural and opposed to commercialism.
Some rich festivalgoers are said to pay tens of thousands of dollars for luxury tents, while others allegedly flew personal chefs into the desert.
Isenberg worries Burning Man may become another Coachella. The California music festival was once one of the hottest tickets in the world but has lost its prestige in recent years amid complaints that it had become too commercialised.
As he has for much of the last decade Isenberg will join his friends at Burning Man next week but beyond that he has an uncertain future with the festival he loves.
“This is the first time that I’ve been questioning whether I will attend next year,” he said.
The Burning Man Project has been contacted for comment.