The festival veteran stepping into a new leadership role at next year’s Hangout Music Fest has shared some details about planned improvements – and about how he came to feel an “intimate awareness” of the event long before he had any responsibility for its success.

The recent announcement of a 2020 lineup topped by Billie Eilish, Post Malone and the Red Hot Chili Peppers seemed to prompt a strong positive reaction among potential patrons. But it also was followed by news that Gulf Shores was pressing the festival to address some concerns from area residents, particularly complaints about offsite noise and nuisance encroachment by patrons on private property.

Festival founder Shaul Zislin said the fest was actively moving to do so, and a city official credited Zislin with a desire to make things better. In individual interviews and at a public meeting on Dec. 5 meeting, one point Zislin wanted to make clear was that it’s not just him – There’s a whole team of people focused on maintaining the festival’s positive aspects while mitigating unwanted “side effects.”

New to the role of leading that team is veteran New Orleans festival producer Reeves Price. To understand where he’s coming from, it helps to know a little about how the festival industry has evolved over the last few years.

Price co-founded Winter Circle Productions in 2009 to produce electronic dance music shows and other events. In 2010 the company launched its signature event: the Buku Music + Art Project, which it describes as a “fusion of EDM, hip-hop and indie rock.” That was the same year the inaugural Hangout Music Fest was held, and five years later the events shared another milestone.

While events like Buku and Hangout had been springing up independently, entertainment-industry giant AEG had been entering the market from the high end. 2015 was the year it bought into both Winter Circle, giving it a stake in Buku, and the Hangout Fest. While that created a theoretical kinship between Winter Circle and Hangout, there was no direct link. A separate AEG branch, Goldenvoice, produced Hangout in conjunction with Zislin and executive director Sean O’Connell.

That lasted through the 2019 event before a new arrangement took shape: Now designated as AEG Live’s Gulf Coast regional office, Winter Circle has taken over the roles filled by Goldenvoice (which produces festivals including the top-tier Coachella event in California) and O’Connell.

The good news, for Hangout Fest fans, is that Price – whose official title is VP of Operations for AEG Live Gulf Coast/Winter Circle Productions – isn’t coming in blind. Far from it.

“I went to the very first Hangout, I think I’ve been to eight out of the 10,” he said. “I met my wife at the Hangout festival. My business partner, we did his bachelor party at the Hangout Festival. So I’m intimately aware of the event.”

“It’s held a dear place in my heart for a long time,” he said. “In New Orleans we’ve got a bunch of great festivals, obviously. But Hangout was something that was, it’s different than Jazz Fest and it was always a little bit more in line with my musical tastes. And also by the level of production and the quality of the experience. It’s not something that you see in very many festivals in this country. I think it’s on par with Coachella in terms of the attention to detail and the level of experience. I always appreciated the approach and the attention to detail that Lilly and Shaul and Sean and those folks have put into it.” (Lilly Zislin, wife of Shaul, has long been cited by festival officials as the person most responsible for the artistic design of its public and backstage areas.)

“It was the one I went to every year to enjoy myself,” said Price. “I always looked forward to going over there and getting to just unwind for a bit.”

That’s off the table this year: Price and Winter Circle might be stepping into an established event, but they’re also stepping into a situation where promises of change have been made. Backing those up translates to a lot of detail work.

One sore spot concerns property encroachment as tens of thousands of patrons flood the area just north of the festival’s beachfront site, including residential neighborhoods. Gripes include trespassing, public urination, illegal parking and litter.

“We’re creating what we’re going to call the Hangout Ambassador program,” said Price. “The idea is to deploy festival staff members into the surrounding areas around the festival site, and for them to sort of be a first line of defense and sort of a deterrent factor against people doing nuisance things. But also to be a resource and visible point of contact for residents in those areas.”

The Ambassadors will have two key roles, Price said. One is to serve as a conduit between residents and festival leadership. “If a resident has an issue and they’re calling the city or whoever else, the idea is that we want them coming to us,” Price said. “We’re a little more nimble, maybe so we can hopefully respond and stop a problem before it starts.”

The other is help guide patrons away from problematic behavior – or to scotch it simply by being present.

“It’s amazing how much you will see people not do dumb things when they just feel like somebody’s watching,” Price said. “And for the most part, our attendees are respectful.”

“The main purpose of these folks is to remind people that ‘Hey, there’s people that live here. Please be respectful,’” he said. “If it escalates much beyond that, then they have direct lines into us and we can call for law enforcement resources if necessary, or if we need to send a cleanup crew to pick up a pile of trash, we can do that.”

Price said such programs aren’t common in the festival industry, but they aren’t unheard of – and AEG, as an international company, has some experience with them. Winter Circle has a small guide program around Buku, and Goldenvoice does something similar around Coachella.

“There’s also a much larger version of this that our company has deployed in London, around the concert series that we produce in Hyde Park,” Price said, adding that it’s not something Winter Circle is directly involved with. “That’s a park that’s in an affluent residential area, and that community is very sensitive to the impact from the event.”

“They have the same issues there when they have Elton John playing in the park that we have at Hangout Festival,” Price said. “This is just to a certain degree the nature of the beast. It’s literally the same things, whether it’s the public urination complaint or loitering or just trash. It’s the same issues.”

The Hangout Ambassador program will be smaller in scale, Price said, but it won’t come cheap. “I’m estimating that it going to cost us about $20,000 to do,” he said.

As for noise complaints, Price said there’s an art and a science to designing and operating the systems that amplify festival performances. Hangout will be investing more in the science this year, he said.

In some aspects it’s as simple as setting decibel limits, communicating those to the sound engineers for visiting acts and monitoring to make sure they comply. “We haven’t nailed down exactly how that’s going to change relative to previous years,” Price said. “But it is going to change and it is going to be more restrictive.”

But it’s also about using technology that helps put the loud where you want it and not where you don’t. It’s about choosing the right kind of speakers, but also taking into account such arcane factors as wind, humidity, soil type and cloud cover. Price said Winter Circle favors gear made by d&b audiotechnik, a German company whose “NoizCalc” software allows user to predict how far the sound from a concert will carry.

“We can actually input the topography,” Price said. “Buildings, hills, things of that nature. And it’ll tell us, it’ll predict what the sound levels are going to be in a certain location, based on all of those inputs. It’s pretty remarkable and it’s really fun to play with.”

Combine that with offsite sound monitoring, he said, and it gives you the tools to make intelligent adjustments if certain sonic elements – like a low-end throb from the Boom Boom Room – is rattling windows somewhere it shouldn’t be.

Time will tell whether all this pays off. For now the effort is about getting the simple things right, then working on the nuances “that get you from a B to an A,” Price said.

“It’s not that the Hangout hasn’t been managing that actively in the past,” he said. “But when I looked at the plans, I think there’s a lot more that could be done. And we’re going to do all that.”

With a single industry juggernaut, AEG, having a hand in Hangout, Buku and even the New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival, one might wonder if the festivals can maintain their distinct individual qualities. Price said that’s right at the heart of his mission.

“At the end of the day, it’s our responsibility to be able to put on the Hangout hat and say what’s best for the Hangout, put on the Buku hat and say what’s best for the Buku,” he said. “Jazz Fest, we have a separate partner in that with Festival Productions and Quint Davis, and Quint always wears the Jazz Fest hat.”

“There’s no top-down mandate,” he said. “It’s our responsibility to be custodians of each of these events and made sure we set them up for success.”

The 2020 Hangout Music Fest takes place May 15-17 in Gulf Shores. For continuing coverate, visit www.al.com/hangout. For information on tickets and accommodations, visit www.hangoutmusicfest.com.