RiverFest won’t be returning to Little Rock in May, organizers said on Monday, though there are tentative plans to hold a scaled-down version next year.
Riverfest Inc., the company that runs the downtown Little Rock music festival, said in a statement that it was taking this year off to "restructure, reorganize and re-invent" the event.
David Renfro, spokesman for the company, said in an interview Monday that organizers want to scale RiverFest down from a three-day music event to something akin to a street festival. It's tentatively scheduled to return in May of 2020.
The budget for the 2019 festival was close to $1.5 million, with $800,000 set aside for music, $200,000 for stage production and property rental, and another $300,000 for advertisers, Renfro said. However, as organizers worked to secure bands, they realized the company couldn’t raise the money necessary to make the event a success, Renfro said, noting music labels were charging too much to recruit bands that wouldn't draw enough attendees.
“I think the event was kind of geared toward drawing people in from six, seven different states,” Renfro said. “And we want to try and build an event that’s geared more toward the communities that are already in Little Rock and the surrounding areas.”
Organizers hope to make the event more affordable and to place a greater emphasis on arts and food vendors, with live music provided by Arkansas musicians, according to Renfro.
RiverFest was a staple in central Arkansas for 40 years before coming to a halt in 2017. Memphis-based Universal Fairs resurrected the festival for 2018, but it didn’t draw as many attendees as organizers initially predicted, the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette previously reported.
“It was not what we expected,” event director Jack Daniels said shortly after the 2018 festival.
Renfro agreed that bringing back RiverFest proved to be a challenge. He said the 90 days Universal Fairs had to plan the 2018 event “wasn’t a lot of time” to book bands and get the word out about the revival. And he noted that organizing a festival is costly, with expenses that include park rental, parking and security.
“We took a pretty good beating in our first year,” he said. “And I think we needed a little bit more time than just the following year to try and reinvent the event.”
Jeff Trine, owner of Damgoode Pies, said the news of this year’s cancellation has a huge impact on his business, though the Arkansas-based business has experienced the hardships associated with the festival’s decline for several years.
“The uncertainty was doing more damage than the finality of the event being over,” he said.
In spite of the cancellation, Trine said he expects another festival to pop up along the river within the next few years, whether it’s another iteration of RiverFest or something entirely different.
“There’s still lots of people that like to go down there, and it’s a great place to have a big party,” he said.
Read Tuesday's Arkansas Democrat-Gazette for full details.