FOMO Festival Creditors Allege They Are Yet To Be Paid From 2020 Events

Directors of FOMO Festival have been accused of not paying fees to multiple crew and site members who worked at the 2020 events. 

The Music broke the news this week that the Australian music festival has gone into liquidation, with debts that currently "could amount" to $5 million. Since publishing that article, The Music has been contacted by a number of people who were contracted to work the 2020 shows this past January and have alleged that directors, which include Anand and Jessica Krishnaswamy and Steven Papas, have not only not paid fees, but have ignored any form of contact from contractors since March.

Meanwhile, FOMO's online presence, including social media platforms, has disappeared following the 2020 shows which featured a line-up that boasted the likes of Grammy Award winner Lizzo, BROCKHAMPTON, Madeon and Meduza.

Architects Of Entertainment (AoE), who have been contracted to provide production management services to FOMO since the festival's debut event in 2016, as well as event operations services for the past two years, allege they are owed over $60,000 from FOMO Festival PTY Limited.

"As per standard operating procedure, we provided regular expense forecasts for the departments we managed. We did not have eyes on their finances outside of the budgets provided to service those departments. We also did not have eyes on their ticket sales numbers," Architects Of Entertainment told The Music.

"FOMO Festival Pty Ltd defaulted on their payments to AoE post-event. AoE proposed an alternate payment plan to FOMO directors to which they agreed. They again defaulted on this new payment plan.

"On top of not being paid for our own work, AoE paid the production crew and site crew we had engaged out of our own pocket to make sure they could pay rent, and we made sure FOMO prioritised payments to valued suppliers and contractors over payments to ourselves, which put us under significant financial stress."

Other creditors have also alleged non-payment, including an engineer who worked at the 2020 festivals, who claims to be owed around $10,000.

The engineer, who wishes to remain anonymous, tells The Music that directors advised they were "working on the fee being paid as soon as they can".

"We'd been told numerous times between February and March that they were working hard to pay us and that everyone was going to get paid," the engineer said.

They too, had stopped receiving any communications from FOMO directors in March.

A representative of East West Presents, who controlled site operations for FOMO in 2020, claims to be owed just under $10,000.

"... post event when everyone was meant to be paid up, [the directors] went quiet," the representative said.

"Then they came out with an email stating that everyone would be paid early March. Paying people six weeks post event is not a done deal. Generally people get paid, at the latest, four weeks post event. So that already kind of rung alarm bells for a lot of people, especially after they stopped replying to any emails."

One of the 2020 festival contractors, who alleges to be owed around $5,000, said they found the directors "to be quite enjoyable to deal with, despite other things I'd heard from other people in the industry".

"I certainly wasn't getting paid regularly throughout the process. I had to chase invoices up a lot of the time. Before we went into the festival, I probably had three or four weeks of outstanding invoices."

FOMO launched in Brisbane in 2016 with a debut line-up that featured the likes of Skepta, Jamie xx and RL Grime and has only expanded in size and the acts it featured on future bills.

Local heavyweights Empire Of The Sun and Peking Duk were named on the 2017 line-up, while 2018 saw global superstar Post Malone take on headline duties, followed by Nicki Minaj in 2019 and Grammy Award winner Lizzo at the events this past January.

The popularity of the festival saw it expand to Sydney and Adelaide in 2017, as well as Melbourne in 2019.

Other big-name local and international artists to have performed at FOMO over the years includes SZA, Flosstradamus, Flight Facilities, Tkay Maidza, The Kite String Tangle and Nina Las Vegas.

The Music has contacted FOMO directors for comment.