Underground Music Showcase to Shut Down After 2025 Event

There are many music festivals in Denver and around Colorado, but the Underground Music Showcase has remained a favorite for its commitment to showcasing local artists. From July 25-27 this year, the festival will celebrate its 25th year with local legacy acts and dozens of other bands.

And sadly, the milestone anniversary will also mark the event's final bow. Festival leaders announced on July 1 that this year's iteration will also be the festival's last.

"We've been having conversations for the last three years about the sustainability of the festival," says Jami Duffy, co-manager of UMS and executive director of Youth on Record. "Every year is a bit of a nail-biter, but we've really been having these conversations in seriousness in the past couple of months as we've seen ticket sales and rising costs." The UMS began in 2001 as a grassroots, DIY effort led by Denver Post journalists Ricardo Baca, who went on to create the agency Grasslands, and John Moore, who now reports for the Denver Gazette. The festival was bought by the Denver Post in 2010; in 2018, it was purchased by the events agency Two Parts, which was co-founded by Casey Berry and Tobias Krause. Then in 2022, the nonprofit Youth on Record bought into the festival, joining Two Parts to run the show and add more resources for musicians and attendees, as well as a yearly impact report.

With a disappointing economic outlook this year, though, canceling the festival was "on the table," Duffy says, but she and co-manager Berry "had a real heart-to-heart and laid out every option." "This festival is so meaningful to so many people. It's become a part of the cultural zeitgeist of our city. And what we didn't want to do was either rip it away from folks without a chance to say goodbye, which would be to cancel this year. The other thing is, we didn't want to tell people afterwards," she says. "It was so much about giving the fest-goers and the artists some agency to approach this finale the way they want to."

Duffy notes that the festival's closure is part of a nationwide trend. CNN's reporting points to music fans leaning toward spending their money on large touring acts, which can be just as expensive as festivals, as well as rising operational costs that festival ticket sales can't cover. Community needs and the social landscape have also changed a lot since UMS began, Duffy adds, which has led to more expenses.

"When you look at 25 years ago, we didn't have the same public-safety considerations, we didn't have the same climate considerations," she says. "We didn't have the same social considerations, in terms of artist wages and accessibility and mental-health care. We didn't have a fentanyl crisis. When you're producing an event for the public, if you're going to be responsible about it, you have to be responsible about mission. And mission costs money."
When Youth on Record bought into the UMS, it implemented its mission; the nonprofit increased artist wages, diversity and accessibility, as well as adding mental-health and harm-reduction supports and programming like the Get Loud Music Summit, a music conference in which the public and musicians can learn more about professional development and the music industry, as well as how to navigate mental health. Combine that with expenses for everything from security to bartenders, stages, barricades and shelters for climate changes (another difference from 25 years ago), and it's a heavy lift.

"Even if the festival sold out every year, which it doesn't," Duffy says, "it's still not enough to meet the moment of both safety standards and social standards to do a festival that has a real impact and a mission."
While these factors may have increased costs, Duffy says she would do it all over again. "I would not have done much differently in terms of doubling down on mission, including an accessibility plan, a music summit, sober supports, harm reduction supports, increasing artist wages. I would have done all of that again. We don't need to save nickels to skip out on mission. That's not who we are at Youth on Record."

The hope is that UMS will be able to rise again in some form, and "we're going to kick some of those conversations off during UMS this year," she says. "We're going to be listening to music, but we're also going to be having intentional conversations about what's next. So we'll entertain every idea right now, not only for the festival but for our broader ecosystem. So we really want people to join us at the Get Loud music summit, because conversations will be had there."

Duffy is optimistic about the future. She points to other community members who have been working toward expanding the local music scene, such as DNA Picasso and his nonprofit, Colorado Music Industry Alliance. That's inspiring to see, just as it was inspiring to see how UMS expanded its accessibility alongside Kalyn Heffernan and Jessica Wallach, or how it received a "big response" for its sober bars, Duffy says.
She recalls how at Youth on Record's first year of co-owning UMS, she ran into some musicians who had taken advice from the festival's newly implemented Impact Days, which artists can sign up for to learn about the industry, accessibility, mental-health resources and more. The band had decided to perform its set sober, and Duffy saw the members beaming after their set. "I thought, 'Man, it's working,'" she says. "That's breaking a really harmful cultural cycle we've lost so many friends to."

With a scene like Denver's, there's hope that this unfortunate UMS news will stir up conversations that will lead to more local innovation for activations continuing the city's musical legacy.

"The future of discovery music in the American West also can't rest solely on the shoulders of UMS," Duffy says. "Every artist, every venue owner, every manager, every producer, anyone who is involved in this ecosystem genuinely has to come to the table and assume that nobody's going to solve this for us. We have to solve this together. So it's an invitation to build a coalition. And I think that is the glimmer of hope in this. Sometimes we don't know what we've got until it's gone."
It's safe to say that UMS will feel far more nostalgic this year. With such legacy acts as DeVotchKa, Flobots, Colfax Speed Queen, Dressy Bessy, Cheap Perfume and so much more, the fest was already primed to be one of the best iterations yet. And following this announcement, festival-goers and musicians will approach the event with more intention than they might have had before.

"We want you to know that you are experiencing something special while it's happening, so that you can really breathe in those moments," Duffy says. "So you can hug a little longer and give a higher high five and play your asses off. And sometimes you don't know you're in a magical moment when you're in it. But this year, we all know we're in a magical moment together."

Find tickets to UMS at undergroundmusicshowcase.com.