A Cloudy Forecast for Festival Season
It’s easy to process music festivals in aesthetic terms (does the lineup look good?) but as the last month in Gulf South festival news reveals, it’s never that simple.
Exhibit A: Hangout Music Festival in Gulf Shores, which has been a standard summer festival since 2010. It has relied on the same mix of rock, hip-hop, indie rock, and electronic dance music that more or less populated Voodoo and BUKU in New Orleans and brought such artists as Lana Del Rey, Post Malone, Travis Scott, Kendrick Lamar, and Tame Impala to Gulf Shores.
Last year, the festival was rebranded for a year as Sand In My Boots with headliner Morgan Wallen curating a lineup that also included T-Pain, 2 Chainz, Diplo, and The War On Drugs. Really, only Wallen and Brooks & Dunn made it something other than a usual Hangout, but after it, Gulf Shores Mayor Robert Craft announced that Hangout 2026 wouldn’t happen but that it would be back in 2027 with a lineup presumably closer to that of Sand In My Boots.
“We will refuse to let them go back to the acts we’ve had before, so [promoter AEG] couldn’t do it,” Craft told People. “So they canceled the 2026 event but they’ve got time now to pursue the type of talent we want on our beaches, to invite the right audience that we want on our beaches.”
The issue wasn’t whose music is better, Wallen’s or Kendrick’s. It was who they attracted. As Lawrence Specker reported at AL.com on a Gulf Shores community meeting on the future of the festival, “residents and local officials found the Sand in My Boots Crowd to be better behaved and more affluent. ‘A lot more clothing, dramatically less issues,’ said one business owner of the difference.”
Specker continued, “City leaders have said that Sand in My Boots brought in more than $2 million in direct tax revenue for the city. Other benefits include around $4 million in spending by the festival production team on lodging and services. Festival attendees seemed to spend much more money locally than their Hangout Fest counterparts had done, said [the city’s director of economic development and public affairs Blake] Phelps. It was ‘a crowd that was here for more than just attending the event,’ he said.”
The process to nail down what Gulf Shores wanted from the festival ended up taking so long that bookers couldn’t realistically make 2026 happen. But even as the city has paved the way for Hangout 2027, they’ve made it clear that they’d rather not have the money if they don’t like the way it comes. The City approved a one-year extension of their agreement with AEG with a one year option with either able to opt out. “I don’t see us doing another 10-year-type deal” like the one the promoter struck to launch Hangout, Craft said.
Jazz Fest is ahead of that game in New Orleans. It presents itself as a celebration of New Orleans’ musical culture, but it was started and located on the calendar as a way to extend the tourist season. That means the festival has always been booked in part with an eye for who’ll inspire out-of-towners to travel. The Eagles are the first name on the lineup released in December this year, and the success of the Eagles’ residency at the Sphere in Las Vegas says their fans will still fly to see them. That makes sense, since many could easily be empty nesters and at an age where they’ve paid off their mortgage. Next to Sphere prices, Jazz Fest tickets are a bargain.
The festival has long relied heavily on Baby Boomer artists and fans, but it’s hard to imagine that Festival Productions, one of Jazz Fest’s co-producers, wanted to rely on that demographic so firmly. This year’s lineup leads with the Eagles, Stevie Nicks, and Rod Stewart as its top three acts. The three remaining long-time Eagles are all 78 and long-time new guy Vince Gill is a pup at 68. Stevie Nicks is 77, and Rod Stewart is 80.
The lineup isn’t all as old as that. The fifth name on the talent announcement is 33-year-old country singer Lainey Wilson, and she’s joined on the top line of the announcement by R&B artist Teddy Swims (33) and Lorde (29). The producers do their homework and have reasons to think these choices will draw, or draw better than the lineup looks like it might to those of us who don’t book them for a living.
Posting the lineup before Christmas felt like a recognition of some weakness though, and if they could stage some bigger acts, they almost certainly would. Unfortunately, changes to the concert industry don’t work in Jazz Fest’s favor. Concert tours have become exceptionally lucrative for artists at the top. Taylor Swift’s “Eras” tour and Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour showed just how lucrative, and headliner-level artists can make so much money doing their own arena tours—where they can also control the sound and visual presentation—that many are simply less interested in Jazz Fest.
Booking choices are limited by who’ll be on tour in the spring. Bookers can want what they want, but they have to choose from acts that are actually available. When Stephen Rehage produced Voodoo, he always tried to get David Bowie and Tom Waits to play, and Coachella hopes to one day stage a Smiths reunion. Festival producer Quint Davis started courting The Rolling Stones well in advance of booking them for Jazz Fest 2019, and he almost certainly has a list of artists he still hopes he can get.
But if they’re not touring then you get what you get—the Eagles, the return of Stevie Nicks who last played Jazz Fest in 2022, and the ghost of Rod Stewart.
Photo: Basqo Bim’s second line umbrella at Jazz Fest (Photo by Tammie Quintana)
