The UMS is going out loud.

Since 2001, the Underground Music Showcase has brought thousands of underground bands out into the light. But organizers announced Tuesday that the iconic summer festival’s upcoming 25th trip around the sun will be its last — ”at least in its current form,” said Jami Duffy, executive director of both the UMS and its co-owner, Youth on Record.

Simply put, she said: “The dollars no longer make sense.”

The silver anniversary showcase is expected to again draw 30,000 sweaty music-lovers from July 25-27 to see more than 200 bands at 12 indoor and four outdoor venues throughout Denver’s Baker neighborhood. The final headlining bands are All Them Witches, Flyana Bos and Denver’s own DeVotchKa, which top-lined the second UMS, in 2002. 

What happens after that is yet to be determined but, Duffy said: “The UMS as it has been known for 25 years is taking the stage for the last time.”

She issued this disheartening news, she said, as a three-part invitation to the people of Colorado.

“First, we are inviting people to come out and really send this thing off the way that it deserves,” she said. “But this is also an invitation for everybody to enter into a conversation about the next 25 years. We need all the musicians, all the fans, all the policymakers, philanthropists and funders to enter into that conversation. Because while the last 25 years have been fabulous, the next 25 years — it has to look different.”

And yes, she said, this is also an invitation to grieve.

“I just don’t think we provide enough opportunity in this world to do that,” she said.

The UMS, which was begun in 2001 by The Denver Post as a modest, one-night showcase of underground bands deserving of more above-ground recognition, was grown by former pop-music reporter Ricardo Baca into Colorado’s largest and longest-running independent music festival.

Helping to create an important community event that celebrates local and national artists will always be one of his proudest accomplishments, Baca said.

“On one hand, I’m really disappointed to see the festival as we know it go away. It’s a massive loss for Denver and for Baker and so many businesses throughout the entire state. It’s a historic loss for the local arts community, and for the music community, and for hundreds of musicians across the region,” Baca said. 

“On the flip side, having run this festival for years, I fully understand the financial challenges of trying to hold a legal and compliant and safe event given the economic  realities of creating an arts festival.”

Two Parts, an experiential agency founded by Casey Berry, bought the UMS from the Denver Post in 2018. Youth on Record took on a minority stake in 2022, thanks in part to a larger, $1 million donation from philanthropist MacKenzie Scott.

Over the past 25 years, Duffy said, “The UMS has lit the fuse for the discovery of music in the American West.” It also serves as a major economic engine for area businesses. Duffy takes great pride in having incorporated values and programs consistent with the mission of Youth on Record, including mental health, sobriety, accessibility, professional development, representation and harm reduction.

“But the UMS in its current iteration — which really means the co-ownership model, three days on Broadway and at its current size — that just doesn’t work sustainability-wise anymore,” Duffy said.

The news extends a growing national slump in the festival industry that has been attributed to rising costs, declining revenue sources and shifting audience preferences toward major stadium tours like Metallica, which just drew 152,000 to Empower Field over two nights.

“This is a brutal time to be running any business,” said Baca, who has since launched both a wellness public-relations company called Grasslands and a biennial art celebration called Biome. “But it is an especially brutal time to be running a business that is rooted in art.” 

The UMS operates on an annual budget of $1.2 million — all of which goes to artists and infrastructure, Duffy said. The festival has never had a profit margin, she added, “but now we’re facing losses for the first time that could really impact the future of both Two Parts and Youth on Record. In particular, the future of our creative-youth development programs can’t hinge on The UMS working. That just can’t happen.”

The news is a blow to the Broadway Merchants Association, which recently proposed the creation of a special taxing district to fund neighborhood improvements and help finance popular events like the UMS. In the end, Duffy said of that initiative: “It was never going to be enough.”

Several major music festivals face financial challenges that have led to cancellations, hiatuses, or downsizing in 2025 and beyond. Most notably, the granddaddy of them all: The SXSW Music Festival in Austin, which began in 1987, has been overshadowed in recent years by its own concurrent innovation and film festivals. The SXSW Music Festival — in many ways the model upon which The UMS took its inspiration — has announced it will downsize further next year. For the first time, SXSW 2026 will devote zero days exclusively to music.

Other fests canceled, at least for 2025, include the Pitchfork Music Festival in Chicago, the Vancouver Island MusicFest and others in Alabama, Ohio and New York.

“I don’t want to be negative,” said DeVotchka drummer Shawn King, but, overall, “It’s hard not to be negative about what the future holds for festivals.”  

Closer to home, the one-day Westword Music Showcase went on hiatus in 2023 after 27 years. The city of Denver last year transitioned the 21-year-old Five Points Jazz Festival into a year-round grants program to support jazz events. In Fort Collins, Bohemian Nights has been discontinued. One bright spot: The 2-year-old Outdoor Festival has bucked the trend, having just drawn 35,000 to Civic Center Park for four days of music led by Lord Huron and Trampled by Turtles.

Festival organizers have cited declining ticket sales, escalating costs, rising inflation and artist fees, diminished local funding and dwindling sponsorships. Duffy would add Denver’s rising cost of living, a struggling downtown, a city government that is $200 million in the hole and the increased cost of insurance brought on by recent climate calamities.

“We also haven’t rebounded from COVID,” she said. “It’s just a perfect storm.

“We’ve been able to outrun this tidal wave till now, and I thought maybe we would be spared — but it’s clear that we’re not going to be.”

The origins of the UMS

The UMS began as a poll, and the poll began as a reporter’s pitch. That reporter was me: It was an idea for how the Denver Post might introduce readers to the many quality bands on the fringes of a music scene that, in 2001, was coming into its own. 

The idea: Ask local music experts to name the region’s 10 top underground bands. That data led to an extensive Sunday editorial package celebrating Littleton’s David Eugene Edwards, frontman for the band 16 Horsepower. The story ran in conjunction with a concert the band was already scheduled to play in February 2001 at the Fox Theatre in Boulder. The evening was billed “The Best of the Underground.” 

The poll, it was decided, would become an annual snapshot of the local music scene. The next year’s winner was DeVotchKa, a mariachi polka punk band named after a line in “A Clockwork Orange” that would go on to earn an Oscar nomination for scoring the 2006 film “Little Miss Sunshine.”

The band got the same cover treatment, and agreed to headline a showcase at the Bluebird Theatre as part of a bill featuring only bands from that year’s top 10: Munly, Mr. Pacman and Xiren. Four bands, five bucks. The bands split the door. The Bluebird took the bar. It was a modest beginning for a showcase that in short order would expose mainstream readers to punk, surf rock, cello rock, gothic country, noisy art rock, hip-hop, wall of sound, pop rock, DJs, comedians and more.    

By 2002, DeVotchKa was already seven years old and beloved by those who knew them but still unsigned by a major label, in part because they were unclassifiable. King remembers headlining the Bluebird that night as a rite of passage.

“We needed a little more gas in the tank to keep going at the time,” he said. “We weren’t making any money, so print coverage meant everything to us. Accolades can encourage your broke (butt).”

In 2006, Baca expanded the annual one-off into a more ambitious, multiple-day festival in the Baker neighborhood. He also gave the fest its now ubiquitous UMS acronym and quickly grew the event into a four-day party with as many as 325 bands. All in volunteer service to the festival while working as a beat reporter at The Post. After 2010, The Post hired Kendall Smith to run the UMS through the Denver Post Charitable Foundation until it was sold in 2018.

Throughout those early years, The UMS made its reputation for its grassroots, DIY and independent spirit. In 2003, that meant Friends Forever, a Devo-like band known for playing sidewalk shows out of their van, tying unknowing fans to the support poles at the Gothic Theater with a big, blue tarp and guitar strings.

King and Duffy both cite a rainy 2009 flash-mob appearance by a renegade marching band called Boba Fett & the Americans as their favorite all-time UMS memory.

“That was transcendent,” Duffy said. “That was a moment where the UMS just transported us into a different parallel universe, and it was amazing. That was the moment I said, ‘I love living here in Denver.’”

For Baca, it will be any time anyone ever told him the UMS is the best weekend of the year in Denver — “especially when they didn’t know I had a part in starting it.”

Continuing the legacy

Conrad Mata, an actor and musician who has been described as Denver’s premier artist in the experimental Latin urban genre, said playing the UMS fulfilled a life goal.

“The UMS has been a pivotal part of my journey as an artist,” he said. “All I wanted to do was play the UMS.”

Losing it now, he added, brings him both shock and sadness. But he has hope.

“The UMS is an absolute gem that the music community is going to miss,” he said, “but I have faith the music community will come together and work to ensure that the legacy of the UMS continues.”

With so many economic factors working against the UMS, Duffy said it would have been easy to simply cancel the 2025 UMS and move on. Or wait until after it was over to announce its demise. But she said the local music community deserves the opportunity to properly send it off with no regrets.

“The UMS means a lot to a lot of people,” she said. It means a lot to this city, it means a lot to our artists, and it means a lot to its founders. It means a lot to me. And so the decision to make this announcement now felt so much more honoring of the festival and its history than sending some sheepish email in September that says, ‘By the way, this isn’t going to work anymore.’”

She’s calling the 2025 UMS “one last weekend of discovery, celebration and legacy.”

The end of the UMS will leave a sizable void in the heart of Denver’s cultural community. But the good thing about the existence of any void, King said, is that it creates an opportunity to fill it.

“There are clearly people who want to do this, and there’s clearly a need for it,” he said. “We have got to be thinking as a community about how to meet that need.

“So we’ll see what happens.”