The countdown is well and truly on for the 2026 Tamworth Country Music Festival with campers moving in snag their favourite swag spots and the city preparing for an influx of music-loving visitors.
Tamworth Regional Council Mayor Russell Webb officially opened the Design RV Riverside Camping area on Friday, a week out from the festival.
The campaign area has been an institution at the annual January celebration of country for decades and is expected to attract up to 5000 campers.
“I think this year is going to be absolutely fantastic,” Mr Webb said.
“One of the fantastic things about the festival that comes to team with the country music festival is we’ve got to make it affordable. The affordability of camping in a location like this is such that it allows people to come here.”
Welcoming campers to Tamworth even before the first chord is played has flow-on benefits for the city and the region as a whole.
“Coming a week early and setting up here just gives those people that are camping here probably an opportunity to go and spend some money in our CBD and other shops around the region and it also enables our economy to get that extra boost,” Mr Webb said.
“We’ve got a great line-up of artists. Most of them are free, but there are many paid for shows. We encourage people to make it a mix of both so that the free shows can probably help you with your budget, but the paid shows actually help the fact that venue operators can actually afford to run those shows and pay those musicians and those entertainers throughout the festival.”
Tamworth Regional Council Events Manager Barry Harley said the camping area was designed to cater for the overflow from caravan parks, with accommodation space at a premium during the festival.
“Over the last couple of years we’ve reached a bit of a peak here with at least 1500 to 1600 sites housing about 4000 to 5000 people in this particular area,” he said.
“This particular facility isn’t designed to take any business away from anyone but it’s so handy because it’s CBD so people can come with their vehicles and their caravans, park here and virtually walk around the festival.
“It’s always gratifying to see people arriving early because that signals that more people are coming. We’re not in a capacity to make the festival any bigger, but we do work hard to make it better every year.”
Mr Harley said numbers of music lovers attending the festival were expected to be on par with previous years which is 30,000-40,000 people each day.
“We’ve got close to 2000 scheduled events across those 10 days with over 700 artists plus buskers and in 80 venues,” he said.
One of the ways Tamworth Regional Council is working to make accommodation affordable for the artists as well as the fans, is by offering bursaries to artists for accommodation and travel, through sponsors Joblink Plus and other businesses.
“We offered 29 bursaries of $1000 each but the number of people that applied was much higher than that,” Mr Harley said.
The Tamworth Country Music Festival kicks off officially on January 16, celebrating the 54th festival.
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