Burning Man Has Sold Out Since 2011. Why Not This Year?

Burning Man, the Nevada desert festival that routinely sells out tickets, is set to return this month, and ticket sales have slumped for the first time in years.

It’s too soon to pin down what has caused the ticket sales shift, but factors most likely include two consecutive years of extreme weather, economic conditions and the organization of the Burning Man community. Here’s what to know.

Tickets usually sell out for the desert festival.

This year’s festival begins Aug. 25 and ends on Sept. 2, bringing tens of thousands of people to the Nevada desert to create a temporary community called Black Rock City, about 120 miles northeast of Reno.

The festival began in 1986 on a San Francisco beach when people gathered to burn a wooden figure on the summer solstice. It moved to the desert in 1990 and sold out for the first time in 2011, and has continued to sell out, often quickly, every year since. Festival organizers had to cap attendance that year and stopped official ticket sales in early August, though last-minute tickets were usually still available on the resale market.

The official ticket sale is done in segments, and this year, people can still buy a $575 ticket from the sale tier that opened on July 31. Tickets are also available for $225 for people with limited income. The Reno Gazette-Journal reported on this change earlier this month.

Marian Goodell, the chief executive of the Burning Man Project, the nonprofit that organizes the festival, said in an interview on Wednesday that organizers expected this year’s Black Rock City population, which includes guests and staff, to be in the low 70,000s. Last year, the population was 74,126.

Ms. Goodell said that the festival organizers decide how many tickets to sell each year.

“When the demand is lower, we simply turn the faucet back on,” she said.

Brutal heat and halting mud have challenged or even stranded festivalgoers.

To go to Burning Man is to embrace camping in a desert environment that is challenging in the best of weather conditions, which can include chilly overnight temperatures, dust storms and extremely low humidity. There was even more extreme weather in the last two years, which followed a two-year hiatus because of the Covid-19 pandemic.

In 2023, heavy rain drenched Black Rock City, and the Washoe County Sheriff’s Office closed the main road to its entrance, stranding people at the site. Festival organizers warned attendees at the time to conserve water, food and fuel as they waited for the roads to become passable.

Many festivalgoers considered the brutal heat of the 2022 festival, with temperatures exceeding 100 degrees on some days, even worse.

Coachella tickets also took longer to sell this year.

Burning Man is not the only festival this year to see a ticket sales slump.

It took almost a month for Coachella to sell out, when it usually takes a few days or hours, and other music festivals also saw a dip in sales, Billboard reported. A number of festivals across the world are not taking place this year, with organizers citing factors including the financial risk, low ticket sales and extreme weather.

Unlike these music festivals, Burning Man is closer to a wilderness camping experience and demands more from guests. This year’s survival guide tells attendees that they must bring items including one and a half gallons of water per person per day, an extensive first aid kit, duct tape and fire extinguishers.

Those costs start to pile up.

Are people spending less after the pandemic’s buying sprees?

The Burning Man community has always encouraged regular attendees to take breaks from attending because of how tiring the festival can be, and personal finances can make that break a necessity.

“Most of the feedback I get is: ‘I needed a year off,’” Ms. Goodell said. “The other feedback I get is the economy; being laid off; the cost to not just buy a ticket, but to get yourself there; the cost of fuel; the cost to be away from your job.”

Though Americans spent enthusiastically, including on events and travel, as the Covid-19 pandemic slowed down, that exuberance now appears to be moderating, according to several economic indicators and comments from corporate executives.

It has also been an especially bad couple of years for layoffs in tech, an industry that has long fed the Burning Man festival.

Burning Man at home (and with less dust).

Burning Man extends beyond the Nevada desert and includes dozens of sanctioned local events around the world. Ms. Goodell said that a poll in February showed that in 2023, 95,000 people have attended these events.

Katherine Chen, a sociology professor at the City University of New York who has studied Burning Man, said that building support for regional events had long been a part of the festival leader’s plan.

Ms. Chen, author of “Enabling Creative Chaos,” a 2009 book about Burning Man, said that people chose local events for several reasons, including that they might be more convenient.

“If you’re trying to coordinate school for your kids and then elder care for your aging parent,” she said, “it may be easier to relate to your local community, where it doesn’t require such a schlep to get out to this big event.”

Benjamin Wachs, who wrote “The Scene That Became Cities: What Burning Man Philosophy Can Teach Us About Building Better Communities” under the pen name Caveat Magister, said that it was too early to say what caused the decline in ticket sales. But he said he thought it probably had to do with the economy; extreme weather, especially the 2022 heat; and the growth of local events.

There used to be a debate about whether people could be considered Burners if they had not been to Black Rock City, he said, but now “that is no longer a question.”

When Burning Man first sold out in 2011, he remembered it being very hard to buy tickets for the next year’s festival because of the new constraints.

“It’s ironic that running out of tickets was seen as a huge problem at the time,” he said. “And now people are asking if not running out of tickets is a huge problem.”