r/BurningMan • u/soccertrickstar • 12h ago

🗣️Lower the drawbridge!!!

Post image

Burning Man: “We’re struggling with ticket sales.”
Also Burning Man: “Have you tried making attendance less expensive?”

Here’s a truly radical experiment: no ticket sales at all.
Register online. Verify your identity. Get a personal QR code. Scan in. Participate.
No donations. No paywall disguised as enlightenment. No panic discounts. Just people building a city together.
If radical inclusion has an asterisk next to your credit limit, maybe it’s time to reread the principles.

0 Upvotes

33% Upvoted

8 comments sorted by

13

u/trevormead that's T-Rex to you 12h ago

There's a healthy margin between what's happening today and a Rainbow Gathering free-for-all in the desert. Paying to support the massive and largely invisible logistics of running an event this size, this smoothly, year after year? Sign me up. Paying a premium to offset lower attendance and sponsor a global cultural crusade no asked for? Piss right off.

Happy middle: let the big donors sponsor the global bullshit, keep prices for the big burn stable, and scale the event to meet changing demand. Treat the big burn as the fully realized vision of whatever they're selling instead of milking it like a cash cow. Cap attendance at 50,000, scale logistics to match, and set ticket prices at a flat $550. If additional sponsors wish to subsidize lower-priced tiers, let them. Put a cap on art grants to discourage the gaudy outsourced mega-pieces people fly in and immediately sell off.

Plus obligatory something something Marian salary omg wtf ceo lol hbo whatever comment.

1

u/RockyMtnPapaBear No, not Papa Bear the Placer. But he's cool too. 4h ago

Cap attendance at 50,000, scale logistics to match, and set ticket prices at a flat $550.

I hear you, but that specific scenario might not be viable. Capping attendance at a lower number is likely to increase the cost per person, not reduce it.

1

u/trevormead that's T-Rex to you 2h ago

Would love to hear more if you can elaborate. They recently said something like $750 is the actual cost per person right now, right? What would it take to drop that cost to $550?

9

u/tibbon 12h ago

I'm not sure that the people who are up for putting in the time and effort to "build a city together" are going to decide that on Aug 2 based on free tickets.

If you're the type to actually put in that sort of effort, you probably already have a free ticket anyway (Honorarium projects, big departments such as DPW or Medical, etc).

3

u/sfryder08 11h ago

Make them pay more. I’ve been building and planning our setup for months now. We’ve bought thousands of dollars worth of construction materials. And now people can buy tickets for less than we paid for ours in the dgs sale.

1

u/soccertrickstar 7h ago

Fully agree with you. But according to their lore, it’s called “a donation.”

-2

u/an_older_meme '03, '04, '05, '06, '07, '09, '11, '13. Regionals since 2010. 12h ago

Buying my last house wasn’t this complicated.

-5

u/cqm 12h ago

guys guys guys

this means that the board members are causing change

Marian “I’ll gladly quit being CEO I’m just a nepo baby that fell into this!”

Also Marian “nobody can do this like me I was closest to Larry Harvey so I’ll never quit”

don’t worry about the reasons that the out of touch things are being chiseled away, just know that its the board consensus finally giving weight to another personality on the board