The annual counterculture art festival in the Black Rock desert of Nevada, Burning Man, is a home away from home for many tech companies. (Google has a major presence, and has been known to hire CEOs on the basis of their attendance). Now, Mashable has learned, the Burning Man organization is about to hand over its sales operation to another tech company: Ticketfly.

"We are in the business of providing ticketing and other technology for live events, and there is no more notable live event in the world than Burning Man," says Andrew Dreskin, Ticketfly's co-founder and CEO. "I was part of the team that first brought Burning Man's ticketing online in the 1990s, so it's a homecoming of sorts for me."

See also: 36 Surreal Instagram Images From Burning Man

The Burning Man organization has been subject to a lot of criticism in recent years over its ticketing operation. Its website is notorious for crashing when tickets go on sale; in 2012, the org (as attendees call it) declared it would dispense tickets on a lottery system — to the chagrin of artists and other longtime attendees.

Ticketfly, founded in 2008 and based in San Francisco, has sold $500 million worth of tickets in its short lifetime. It's on a tear, with 1,300 clients in the U.S. and Canada in 2013, a 33% jump from the previous year.

But it's just that sort of commercial success that can be anathema to the average Burner. The event has several long-held tenets, one of which is that there is no branding allowed at the festival itself. Even the suggestion of a commercial connection can irk attendees. The org's decision to allow green energy companies to showcase their wares at the 2007 festival — even without logos or literature — was met with howls of protest from Burners.

But the Burning Man organization, which is planning to convert from a for-profit LLC to a non-profit, believes that the positive effect of a working ticket system will outweigh any negatives. "We are excited about the robustness of [Ticketfly's] system," reads the announcement in the Burning Man newsletter Jack Rabbit Speaks, "and their commitment to superior customer service."

Caravan of Culture

Every year, Burning Man provides a different theme for its artists to riff on. The 2014 theme, just announced, is "Caravansary" — named for a network of oases and other resting points that criss-crossed the Silk Road from Europe to China for thousands of years.

"Like the ancient Silk Route, Burning Man's communities are spread worldwide," writes Burning Man founder Larry Harvey on the org's website. "They form a network stretching all the way from Italy to South Korea, from Lithuania to Brazil. In 2014, we will invite these groups to help create a real-life caravansary that represents their varied cultures."

Traditionally, nothing is sold at Burning Man (except for coffee and ice), but this year Harvey appears to be taking a playful attitude to the notion of commerce. "Participants will come upon an inexhaustible array of teeming goods and unexpected services," he writes. "Anyone may pose as 'merchant' here, and anyone may play a 'customer', but nothing in this strange emporium shall have a purchase price."

Image: Mike Nelson/AFP/Getty Images