Tamworth Country Music Festival

Tamworth Country Music Festival
The Tamworth Country Music Festival
Genre	Country music, Bluegrass, Rock, Western swing, World music, Folk
Dates	Friday 20 January to Sunday 29 January 2017
Location(s)	Tamworth, Manilla, Kootingal
Years active	1972 - Current
Website
http://www.tcmf.com.au/

The Tamworth Country Music Festival is an annual music festival in January held in Tamworth, New South Wales, Australia and is a celebration of Country Music culture and heritage in particular the national Australian country music scene, with numerous concerts and live performances at various venues. The festival lasts for two weeks over Australia Day and during this period the city of Tamworth comes alive, with visitors from all across the country and worldwide who come to join in the festivities. The festival has many times been counted among the world's top ten music festivals. In 2007 Forbes rated it as number 8 of the World's Coolest Music Festivals. The enormous number of visitors during the doubles the city's population and brings significant tourism and economic benefits to the region. Visitor numbers for the 2012 festival were estimated at 50,000.

The mass number of visitors means that accommodation throughout the area is consistently booked out for this period up to 12 months in advance, with many visitors camping in caravans, camper vans and tents by the city's riverside and numerous other temporary camping sites throughout the region. The festival is the second biggest country music festival in the world, after Nashville.

A significant amount of media coverage is given locally and national, in the printed media and also with the three big commercial networks the Nine Network, Channel 7 and Ten Network having broadcast news and segments from the festival. There is also national radio coverage from stations including ABC Radio Australia and syndicated country music program Ben Sorensen's REAL Country broadcasting from the festival each year.

When the Tamworth Country Music Festival commenced is often debated. In 1968 the then Tamworth branch of the Modern Country Music Association, now the Capital Country Music Association (CCMA), began a talent quest on the Australia Day January Long weekend. The talent quest, now known as the CCMA National Talent Quest, is considered a major influence in what was to become the Festival in January 1973 with the first staging, by local radio station 2TM, of the Australasian Country Music Awards (aka the Golden Guitar Awards for its unique "golden guitar" trophy) as part of its Country Music Capital promotion which had commenced in 1969.