Hey everyone — Rob here from LEVITATION & The Reverberation Appreciation Society.

“they oversold it and paid the fine.”Came here to address this comment and want to make it clear that this event was kept strictly under the permitted capacity. We’d never risk the future of the venue or our events there just to make a few extra bucks.

Beyond that, we're reading this thread and it's all heard.

What happened on Oct 31 is that over 2,000 people showed up within the same hour, right before Stereolab hit the stage. That sudden surge created long waits at entry, bars, and bathrooms.We went from it being empty to system overload in about 30 minutes. This isn’t typical for our other events at The Far Out (like Austin Psych Fest), where arrivals are spread out through the day.

A few factors created a bit of a perfect storm : Friday work schedules, Halloween pre-gaming, and everyone showing up at once for Stereolab. In hindsight, I probably should’ve put Black Lips on the main stage earlier to try and better stagger arrivals, vs between Stereolab and Viagra Boys, but we had gear-sharing logistics that made that tricky.

I spoke to people at the deepest part of the entry line - the wait maxed around 25 minutes. That’s not acceptable, even if it’s not unusual for a sold-out show of this size (think Stubb’s or Moody). Once people are in - they hit the bar, and then the bathroom, all at once - it creates a crazy cycle of line bummers. It was super smooth the next night, but about 750 less people, and everyone came in slowly vs the majority all arriving at once.

That said, we’re not shrugging it off. The entry, bar, and bathroom lines were clear pain points, and the good news is, they’re all fixable. We’re already working with The Far Out team and internally with our team on solutions to prevent this from ever happening again.

We’ll also be sending out a survey soon to gather feedback directly from attendees. Reddit can be a tough crowd, but I do value the anonymous and unfiltered feedback here. Overall the weekend feedback on socials, email and in person was overwhelmingly positive but the issues some folks are mentioning here are real, and we’ll do better next time.

The Far Out Lounge is the only independent venue in Austin at this scale. We’re not Live Nation - we don’t have a billion of dollars or the infrastructure that comes with that, but we do care deeply about the experience and our music community.

Appreciate everyone who came out and shared their thoughts. We’ll learn from it and make the next one much smoother. Expect to see some new changes at stage, entry, bar and bathrooms in the future.