Morgan Wallen’s Sand in My Boots Festival, Hangout Music Fest Canceled in Gulf Shores for 2026

Neither Morgan Wallen’s Sand in My Boots festival nor the traditional Hangout Music Festival will take place in 2026, Gulf Shores, Alabama, Mayor Robert Craft confirmed Monday evening (Dec. 8) during a city council meeting.

“The Hangout Music Festival will not occur in 2026,” Craft said. “We will not have an event in 2026. We are already approving the event in 2027.”

The Hangout Fest has been held in Gulf Shores since 2010, typically featuring a pop-leaning lineup. In 2024, it was announced that Wallen would take over the festival for one year in 2025, rebranded as the Sand in My Boots Festival.

The Mayor added that the timeline for a 2026 event became too tight, thus pushing the event to the following year. 

“We delayed too long, or they did, in their application to be able to get the kind of acts that we required them to have to be successful in 2026,” he said. “We will refuse to let them go back to the acts that we’ve had before. So they couldn’t do it and so they canceled the 2026 event.

The 2025 event was a massive success, selling out 40,000 tickets almost immediately—a feat the Hangout Fest hadn’t achieved in years. Wallen performed alongside artists including HARDY, Brooks & Dunn, Post Malone, and more.

Following the festival, locals praised Sand in My Boots for a better overall experience compared with previous Hangout Fest events, citing a more well-behaved crowd and fewer issues.

“My analogy has been, my own personal thoughts, [that] in the past, we had young kids with their daddy’s credit card here and not a whole lot for them to worry about,” Mayor Craft said, according to AL.com. “They were on a free leash. So this year we had an older group that had their own credit card. And you could certainly see that they were more disciplined. There were less problems. … Really it was a much better behaving crowd.”

Local business owner Anthony Gallo of Ice House Taproom, near the festival site, also shared positive feedback. “A lot more clothing, dramatically less issues… Last year there were a lot of declined cards on the last day. This year there were not,” he said. “From a business standpoint, our revenue definitely increased … This was a remarkably better experience this year than last year, hands down.”

The Mayor is hopeful that the event can return in 2027 and deliver a positive experience for everyone involved, however it is not clear if the 2027 event will return as Sand in My Boots festival or  Hangout Music Festival. 

“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, that we proved last time, the last event, that could happen. We’re determined if it’s going to happen, it’s going to happen that way again.”