2011 Hangout Music Festival officially sells out

GULF SHORES, Alabama -- It’s now officially too late: Organizers of the 2011 Hangout Music Fest have announced that the event has sold out.
All VIP tickets and most of the festival’s late night shows already had been sold out for some time. Because the festival hit its cap of about 35,000 patrons entirely through sales of 3-day passes, no single-day passes will be offered this year, organizers have declared.
According to Sunday’s announcement, the only show tickets left are to a pre-party on Thursday, May 19, and to after-hours shows by Rich Aucoin and Tony Clifton.

Festival founder Shaul Zislin said he was “feeling fantastic” about the news, though it left him and other organizers facing a reality check. Last year’s inaugural edition came nowhere near capacity, meaning that this one will require more work to maintain the event’s laid-back feel.

“I’ve been telling people, it’s like you have a party and you have 15 guests show up,” he said. “You can give them attention and they can do anything they want to do and everybody’s happy and goes home and says, ‘What a great party.’ Now we’ve got to do the same thing with three times the amount of people.”
Zislin said that while he hadn’t taken a sellout for granted, he had been feeling good about the possibility.
“Since the announcement of the lineup, we’ve felt pretty good about the pace of ticket sales,” he said. “We’ve been saying now for the last four-five weeks that we think we’re going to sell out, just based on the pace.”
The important thing, he said, is that the sellout came nearly two weeks before the festival’s start. That means there’s plenty of time to get the word out, so that people understand there won’t be any weekend passes or day passes available at the gate.
Zislin said he’s aware that “there’s some disgruntled people” about the decision not to offer single-day passes. A limited number were made available last year.
“From the beginning, we wanted to package the event as a three-day festival,” he said. “You come and you see it in its entirety. It’s one of the underlying premises of it.”
That approach has helped with condo and hotel bookings along the coast. Rental agencies have reported that Gulf Shores and Orange Beach are booked up, and festival patrons have taken rooms in Foley, Pensacola and Mobile.
The festival takes place May 20-22 on the beach at the foot of Ala. 59 in Gulf Shores. For information on the remaining pre-party and late-night tickets, visit www.hangoutmusicfest.com.