In Bloom Festival will not return

The In Bloom Music Festival will take place this Saturday and Sunday at Eleanor Tinsley Park and will feature Beck and Incubus. The In Bloom Music Festival will take place this Saturday and Sunday at Eleanor Tinsley Park and will feature Beck and Incubus. Photo: Roger Ho Photo: Roger Ho Image 1 of / 111 Caption Close In Bloom Festival will not return 1 / 111 Back to Gallery

Where Houston for a short time had an embarrassment of music festival riches, with both a summer and winter event, the city now finds itself with neither. The In Bloom Music Festival will not return in 2019, ending an event that had ties back to the old Free Press Summer Festival, which began in 2009.

The festival's site posted the following message: In Bloom Music Festival will not return. We would like to thank all of the fans who attended and celebrated great music at In Bloom and FPSF over the past several years."

The announcement didn't come as much of a surprise. The lineup for last year's festival was announced in Dec. 2017. When 2018 gave way to 2019 without an announcement, the future of the event appeared endangered.

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In Bloom took place in March 2018 in an effort to rebrand the Free Press Summer Festival, which ran 2009 to 2017. Organizers moved the event up from late May/early June to late March, in hopes of offering milder weather environment for a two-day music fest, and gave it the new name because Free Press Houston was no longer involved in the production.

The inaugural event was a mixed bag, with some great entertainment but also some struggle to find its identity.

But Houston now finds itself without a large-scale, multi-day, genre-inclusive festival. While the bigger prestige festivals like Coachella, Bonnaroo and Austin City Limits Festival have managed to continue, others have struggled for a variety of reasons. Such music festivals are an expensive and high-risk undertaking, and after expansive growth for years, the number of these events appears to be diminishing.

Late last year the plug was pulled on Houston's Day for Night Festival, at least for 2018, and its assets were auctioned off. Day for Night could be resuscitated, but so far there is no word about that festival's future.

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