Orsini recalls that after an additional wait, one of the reps told the attendees that their rides were just around the corner, elaborating:
“The representative comes back,” she says, “and he says, ‘Alright, we’ve just dispatched a fleet – we have 3,000 Ubers coming from the downtown Atlanta area, and everyone will be out in two hours’…Well, I guess that was part of their plan to give us false hope, because they kind of sneakily – they just fled the scene. We looked around at one point and the Uber reps were gone. There were no officials there – just no one.”
Uber had been enlisted as an official transportation partner of TomorrowWorld’s 2015 edition, and usually such arrangements constitute the transportation network company being given a designated lot to assist attendees in the process of using the app to pair up with a driver – but according to Orsini’s testimonial, the representatives made promises that fell outside of their authority.
An employee of Uber who asked to remain anonymous informed We Got This Covered that there is no such thing as a “dispatching” a fleet of Ubers. As of this writing, spokespeople on behalf of Uber have not issued an official statement addressing these claims.
At this point in the trip, many of the festival goers gave up on the misadventure and huddled in droves on the sides of the road to try and sleep instead of simply waiting for something to happen. They fished collapsed cardboard boxes and other pieces of trash out of a nearby garbage receptacle. Orsini and a handful of others, on the other hand, elected to press forward even though their feet had been bloodied and there was still no indication that transportation was on the way.
Two of the people that joined Orsini had an early flight back home to Texas that morning, so they didn’t consider giving up to be an option. It was 4:30 AM at the time she and her new friends continued their trek, and according to attendees who brought pedometers with them, they had already walked roughly 7-8 miles at that point – after being on foot the better part of the day at the festival itself.
Shortly thereafter, one of the guys started getting cell phone service and was able to contact a transportation service to get them back to the city. Orsini was among the very first attendees to get back to her hotel from the event. She arrived at 5:30 AM but points out that many individuals who completed the journey on foot didn’t make it back to their hotel until around 7:30. And then there were those attendees who gave up and decided to sleep alongside the road.
While overturning stones in an attempt to determine why the shuttle service (which was provided by Atlanta company Samson Trailways) actually failed to uphold its end of the agreement with TomorrowWorld organizers, it seems logical to speculate that SFX’s recent financial woes may have led to drastic budget cuts that resulted in the transportation provider pulling out of its business arrangement. It might not be quite that easy, though, as accounts of attendees who camped at Dreamville and were therefore allowed back in for the third day of the massive don’t indicate that the production values of the event suffered in any discernible way.
Despite what numerous bloggers have written, even after the controversy, TomorrowWorld still has advocates – few as they may be.
Mike Knopping is a Denver-based promoter and internet personality who was hired to help market TomorrowWorld market to EDM fans in his area, and was afforded the opportunity to attend the festival with a sizable entourage in the process. On the experience inside the venue, he expounds:
“The venue itself was just getting chewed up, so it wasn’t really, like, the festival’s fault. There were just so many people tracking through the mud, and I actually saw the staff and the crew and everyone busting their ass, a lot more than any other festival I’ve been to. They were trying to accommodate people by laying down hay and putting down sod, just moving around the clock to keep the festival together. I was at Dreamville and everybody who was with me had a great time…A lesser festival would have fallen apart a lot quicker.”
Another Denver scene fixture named Chris Taylor, who’s attended previous editions of the festival, also maintains that the 2015 installment measured up, even going as far as to praise the onsite emergency personnel. “Medical staff was fantastic,” he says. “The medical emergencies I saw were handled immediately and perfectly as compared to other festivals.”
Nonetheless, news that SFX Entertainment has already begun a “fire sale” to sell off its assets surfaced in the days after the third (and most likely final) edition of TomorrowWorld wrapped up for the weekend – a list of electronic music brands that includes Beatport, Totem OneLove Group Pty Ltd, Flavorus, React Presents, Monumental Productions BV, and of course, ID&T itself.
Seeing as how the conglomerate poured an estimated $1 billion into the global EDM industry over its two-year lifespan, ripples from the splash its corpse will make will leave a negative impact on the industry that’s difficult to estimate. With lawsuits already threatening Sillerman in the wake of accusations that he lied to potential investors about being able to take SFX private on his own dime in addition to all of his other troubles, perhaps the impending litigation from TomorrowWorld attendees isn’t high on his priority list.
Regardless, if for no other reason than the PR wildfire that’s erupted in the ruins of TomorrowWorld, somebody has to come forward and address the disparity between what organizers claim caused the event and what attendees witnessed with their own eyes. At the very least, most would agree that the consumers affected by the unsavory turn of events are owed the promise that an investigation will be carried out by those in charge instead of the vaguely worded half-apologies that the company has thrown together.
In the meantime, if you would like to contribute additional accounts of your weekend at the festival, then tell us your story in the comments section below and perhaps we as the electronic music community can get to the heart of the controversy ourselves.