The Burning Man main sale has come and gone, and, as every year since 2012, it sold out completely. Nevertheless, it seems to have been an easy year for getting tickets to Burning Man compared to the last decade. All of the theme camps we know are reporting that their campers scored plenty of tickets in the main sale.
Your intrepid reported analyzed every single comment in the official Reddit Main Sale Ticket Threads for 2023 and 2024 to see how it went for people on that popular forum:
2023
2024
Number of comments
1100
1300
Number of successful tickets purchased as % of comments
64 5.8%
206 15.8%
Number of failures to buy tickets as % of comments
74 6.7%
22 1.7%
Anecdotally, there have not been as many bugs and glitches in the last few years, since the org switched ticketing platforms. The biggest “bug” is that people who try to click at exactly 12:00pm are often told they’re early even when they aren’t, probably a caching issue.
One thing we have to add: when the main sale has finally sold out, everyone who has been patiently waiting in line for hours is taken to a message that says “Burning Man’s … Main Sale is done. Keep the fire burning!” with a link to a donation page. I don’t know if this raises much money, but it really does make a terrible impression and is not winning the org any friends. This might be the one time not to beg for donations.
Every year the Burning Man Project has a FOMO sale at the beginning of the sale season with 3,000 tickets available at $1,500. This is quite high compared to the main sale price of $575, but it’s a great way to get a guaranteed ticket without worrying about the risk of competing in the main sale, which is essentially a lottery.
As recently as last year, the FOMO tickets at the $1,500 price level sold out immediately and even some people who clicked to buy at the start of the sale had to pay for the super-expensive $2,500 FOMO tickets.
But last year’s late summer glut of tickets might have convinced people that FOMO tickets aren’t worth the extra price. As of now, 40 minutes after the FOMO sale opened, there are still tickets available. This might be an early sign that tickets won’t be so hard to get this year for the annual Thing In The Desert.
(ProTip: Even if the FOMO sale does sell out, there are always FOMO tickets readily available in the Secure Ticket Exchange Program, a.k.a. STEP. The bottom line is that if you want to go to Burning Man and $1500 plus fees feels affordable, you can do it.)
Buying tickets for Burning Man is really complicated. Tickets are sold in several sales with different prices and conditions. The dates and deadlines for 2024 have now been updated, so you should start by reading the official site and figuring out your plan!
This year’s temple will be called the Temple of Together, and was designed by lead artist Caroline Ghosn, also known as Glitter Kitty from Camp Mystic.
Almost since the beginning, Burning Man has had a coffee shop at Center Camp where you could buy coffee, and, in later years, fancy espresso drinks and lemonades and stuff. The fact that coffee was for sale at the center of the biggest nothing-for-sale event in the world was hard to explain. Every description of Burning Man in the mainstream media ended up with some kind of awkward construction like “Burning Man, the 70,000-person city where nothing is for sale, except for coffee and ice, …” and before you’ve even explained Burning Man you’re already wondering about coffee.
The reasons for selling coffee were not entirely clear. Larry Harvey’s own explanation from 2013 of why coffee should be sold was not particularly convincing. Nevertheless, the status quo until 2019 was that Center Camp was a pretty dang lovely place, even if you did have to pay for the coffee. Not everyone went, but those who did found a delightful city square, got a chance to interact with people from all parts of the city, and you could sip giant iced coffees while watching hotties doing acro-yoga all day long. Even if you didn’t bring your own cup!
After the Renegade Burn in 2021, though, the myth about how coffee sales make sense started to run out of steam. As one particpant reported, “It turns out that the bizarre requirement, flying in the face of decommodification, to have coffee for sale at center camp was a myth.” Indeed a lot of theme camps that wanted to offer gifts like coffee or create interactive spaces felt like Center Camp just crowded out their gifts… those thousands of burners lining up to buy espresso were not walking the city streets visiting any of the 70 camps that advertised coffee as a gift in 2019.
So coffee sales were ended in 2022. But they build Center Camp anyway, in 2022 and 2023, to continue to host the events, artworks, and community interactions that had always been held there.
It was a ghost town in 2022. So they tried again in 2023 to create something exciting at center camp. “At any given time you may meet (or be!) a tap-dancing platypus, java-slinging cephalopod or rhinoceros puppeteer,” they advertised, but nobody went.
Theme camps, who had been invited to come do “pop up” things at Center Camp, actually preferred to do those things in their own spaces, which is the point of a theme camp, anyway, and what Placement incentivized.
What will happen in 2024? Reddit user hannican kicked off a long and interesting conversation by just suggesting that it’s time to close center camp. And the org is planning a town hall on January 27th to, once again, try and get some ideas for where to go.
Maybe the idea of a top-down organization creating something from the top down for us spectators to enjoy is not really going to work at Burning Man. There are thousands of things created by the participants, and having one big grand Main Stage coffee shop both flew in the face of decommodification but flew in the face of the even more important Burning Man ethos of No Spectators.
Golden Guy Alley is probably the best example of what a Burning Man town square should could be and should be: something that is entirely participant-created, decommodified, both small scale and able to handle crowds, and a real bottom-up city square that fits the ethos of Burning Man a lot better.
Placement is eliminating the Village system that allows multiple camps to be placed as a single unit. It is being replaced by the HUBS system, which is almost the same thing.
For quite a long time now, camps could group together in a system called villages. Camps within a single village could share (or not share) resources such as generators, water, etc., or not, as they saw fit. Some examples of diverse villages include:
AEZ, the Alternative Energy Zone. Camps only had to commit to not using generators of any type to join AEZ.
There are more villages than you think. Some of them look like a single camp when you walk by, some of them look like a bunch of individual camps doing their own thing, and some of them frankly just look like a bunch of open camping stuffed with individual camping groups that don’t appear to be offering much in the way of a public amenity.
In 2022, Placement launched a new program called HUBs which sounded an awful lot like villages. The HUBs program, honestly, was a lot like villages, but with a couple of tiny differences:
Each camp in a HUB is given individual placement by the org, although the HUB itself is asked to submit their desired layout and in my experience they always get what they ask for, possibly after some negotiation as the city map is drawn up
Whereas Villages used to receive the whole allocation of Stewards (DGS) tickets at the village level, which they could redistribute as they saw fit, with HUBs every camp gets its own Stewards tickets.
Although this may come as a surprise to some people, in the end it’s really more of a minor classification difference. Villages that feel like they are really doing one thing with a single identity might want to just register for 2024 as theme camps, and heck, nobody said you can’t include “village” in your name. Nobody will notice the difference! Other villages that cooperate differently where the camps really have their own identities can simply register as HUBS and find that the practical differences are negligible.
Martini Village in 2019. Photo by Philippe Glade, who has a beautiful book full of pictures of the architecture of Burning Man.
The Burning Man organization announced that they had passed their BLM inspection for 2023.
Many both inside and outside the Burning Man community were concerned that the rain and mud at the end of this years’ event might have made it impossible to pass. Many people and even entire camps appeared to flee the playa during the rain, apparently leaving a mess behind. “Common knowledge” was that cars and RVs and entire theme camps were abandoned in the mud. Many people had believed that the deep mud puddles contained hidden lots of hidden moop that would be impossible to discover.
Well, that turns out to be not what actually happened. “During the six weeks after the Burning Man event officially ended, and as they do every year, crews were still on site doing the final cleanup push leading to the BLM inspection. These teams picked up all kinds of Matter Out of Place (or MOOP): small debris, wood chips, tent stakes, and other items accidentally left behind from the 2023 event,” according to the organization.
The announcement this year came on November 29th. Many people wondered why it is so late, given that the actual BLM inspection already happened more than a month ago. In fact, this is not much later than normal. In 2019 the announcement was on November 19th, in 2018 it was on December 24th, in short, don’t read so much into why it took so long for the announcement. And don’t confuse the BLM inspection with the Moop Map, which can take forever (the Moop Map for 2022 did not arrive until March 2023).
Awakening by Ryan Elmendorf and Nick Geurts from: Denver, CO Courtesy Duncan Rawlinson, duncan.co
One of the beautiful things about Burning Man is that you can so easily find yourself in situations where you have zero clues as to what is going on. Or who that person is doing that thing, or why. And it’s okay. In fact it’s a kind of magic. As much as we value preparedness, and plan out our chaos with an ironic degree of precision, it is these moments of random WTF that bring the serious joy, and keep us coming back for more.
Here are some great sets of photos from the 2023 burn:
Duncan Rawlinson, 1269 professional quality pictures, all available as creative commons. These are great because you can use them for any non-commercial project, and he has pictures going back a decade too.
Every year, over 70,000 people get tickets to Burning Man through a variety of different ticket sales and processes. So many tickets are reserved for special sales that only a small number of tickets are available to the general public in the main sale.
This year, the main sale will offer 15,000 tickets, which amounts to a significant increase over the pool in 2022, which was only 10,000 tickets. The allocation seems to have come from a reduction in tickets available for the Stewards Sale, which is down from 35,000 to 30,000 tickets.
The Stewards Sale reflects tickets made available to theme camps, art projects and mutant vehicles.
This might make it feel like it’s “easier” to get tickets in the Main Sale — 50% easier! To be honest, though, 15,000 is still not a lot of tickets compared to the demand; they will sell out instantly; and, for all intents and purposes, the main sale is a lottery.
And it also might make it feel like it’s “harder” as a returning theme camp, to get tickets in the Stewards Sale, although actually, last year, there was larger than usual demand for Stewards Sale tickets because camps that were promised tickets for the cancelled 2020 event were allowed to use those tickets in 2022. So overall the ticket situation this year is likely to be pretty much more of the same.
The “Box Office” on playa doesn’t really sell tickets, because they’ve all sold out well in advance, but if you order your tickets for “Will Call”, they will be waiting for you here. Photograph by Duncan Rawlinson, duncan.co.
