The website and app that run Australia’s biggest country music festival

The Tamworth Country Music Festival is Australia’s largest country music festival and the largest country music event in the Southern Hemisphere. It runs for ten days each January in Tamworth, New South Wales, with 700-plus artists performing across more than 2,800 events at 120-plus venues. The 2026 festival was the 54th annual edition of the event, held from 16 to 25 January.

The festival was founded by Tamworth radio station 2TM in January 1973, with the Australasian Country Music Awards (now the Toyota Golden Guitar Awards) at its centre. It has grown from a single awards night into a ten-day program of pub gigs, awards, talent quests and free concerts that draws around 300,000 total attendances across the festival period and around 50,000 to 60,000 unique visitors. Tamworth’s local population is around 62,000.

The Toyota Golden Guitar Awards are Australia’s most prestigious country music awards, held annually during the Tamworth Country Music Festival since 1973. The bronze guitar trophy was designed by Harry Frost and modelled on a hollow-bodied electric guitar. Joy McKean received the first Golden Guitar in 1973 for “Lights on the Hill”, and Slim Dusty holds the record for the most wins by any artist in the awards’ history.

The Golden Guitar Awards are one of the named sponsor placements built into the festival website, with dedicated visibility tied to the awards content surfaces that the festival monetises as part of its commercial sponsor inventory.

The Tamworth Country Music Festival runs for ten days each January, attracting around 50,000 to 60,000 unique visitors and around 300,000 total attendances across the festival period. The 2026 festival featured 700-plus artists performing across more than 2,800 events at 120-plus venues, with a long tail of busking, ticketed shows, free concerts and unofficial gigs running across the town. The festival is estimated to contribute over $100 million in direct and indirect economic impact to the Tamworth region each year.

The website handles the planning research, ticket pathways, sponsor inventory and stakeholder applications across the eleven months the festival isn’t on. During the ten-day event itself the same surface manages a “What’s On Now” feed across hundreds of concurrent venues, plus push notifications across the app for the audience already in town.

The website was built around five priority user groups identified in Mude’s August 2023 discovery work with Tamworth Regional Council: rusted-on country music fans, grey nomads, artists, the council’s internal stakeholders, and the festival’s commercial sponsors.

Rusted-on country music fans want to plan their festival across favourite artists and venues. Grey nomads want to filter to free shows and find accessible parking and accommodation. Artists need to list their shows, find venues to play, and apply for talent quests. The council’s internal marketing team needs to run the site themselves without developer involvement for routine work. Sponsors need clear advertising inventory and the click-through reporting to justify the spend. The site was structured so each of those groups gets a coherent pathway through what is otherwise a 2,800-event program.

The festival website’s homepage operates in two modes that swap automatically based on the date. For the eleven months a year the festival isn’t on, the homepage operates as a planning tool, with a countdown to January, a featured-events grid that locks in as the program is announced, and the accommodation, transport and ticket-pathway content a visitor needs while they’re working out whether to make the trip.

The week the festival is actually on, the homepage flips. The countdown disappears, the planning content gets demoted, and a “What’s On Now” feed takes over the main real estate, surfacing what’s happening in the next hour or two across the festival’s 120-plus venues. The mode change runs automatically against the festival dates, because the council marketing team isn’t available to manually reconfigure hundreds of components on the morning the festival opens.

The Tamworth Country Music Festival website treats sponsor placement as a real commercial product. The sponsor inventory includes vertical banner units on the homepage, horizontal placements through interior pages, click-through tracking that feeds reporting, and a Featured Events block on the festival guide that gives major partners named visibility tied to specific user intent. Named placements like Toyota Zone, the Toyota Park concerts and the Toyota Golden Guitar Awards each sit inside the inventory as defined positions.

Sponsors return year after year on the basis of the click-through data they receive in the post-event reporting cycle. The click-through tracking and the reporting feeds were built directly into the WordPress site, so the council team can run a digital wrap-up for each major sponsor without standing up a separate analytics stack. Toyota has been the festival’s title sponsor since January 1994, and the major partners have stayed engaged through every annual cycle since the rebuild.

The Tamworth Country Music Festival website is built on WordPress with a custom component library. WordPress was the right CMS for a festival that needs to be operated by the council marketing team eleven months of the year without ongoing developer involvement, while still supporting the depth of event data, sponsor inventory, applications, and search functionality the festival actually requires.

The custom component library is how the council team builds new pages from existing components and updates show times themselves. The WordPress foundation also meant the site could be extended into a native mobile app a few years later, because the underlying architecture supported it.

The Tamworth Country Music Festival app is Mude’s native mobile app case study, built as an extension of the festival website rather than as a standalone product. The app shares its event data and content management with the website, so the council team manages the festival program in one place and has it surface across both products without dual data entry.

Mude isn’t structured as a standalone mobile app development agency, and the Tamworth app is the studio’s only major iOS and Android app development build. The decision to extend into native iOS app development and Android app development was scoped around what the festival actually needed: an in-venue companion for an audience already in town, with location-aware nearby-venue prompts, push notifications across the ten days, and a “MyFest” itinerary planner that reads from the same event database the website uses.

Mude’s government and council client list includes Tamworth Regional Council (the Tamworth Country Music Festival website and app), Sport Integrity Australia (the Do It Without Doug anti-doping campaign), the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, and the French Embassy in Australia (the Sacrebleu news and culture publication).

The Sacrebleu site shares a structural pattern with the Tamworth Country Music Festival platform: both are event-led WordPress publication sites where a “What’s On” style events stream sits alongside the editorial content, with the in-house team running the day-to-day publishing through structured forms. The studio’s wider event, music and culture work includes Mood on the Roof (Mude’s own Sydney rooftop live-music platform), and a broader portfolio of video, photography, brand identity and digital work for hospitality, FMCG and culturally-led consumer brands.

The Tamworth Country Music Festival is owned and managed by Tamworth Regional Council. Within the council, Destination Tamworth (the council’s tourism and events division) is the team that runs the festival year to year, with a small marketing team handling the digital, content, sponsorship and stakeholder coordination work between the major program announcements. The current festival manager is Barry Harley.

The festival sits inside a broader Tamworth tourism economy that includes the Big Golden Guitar landmark, the National Guitar Museum, and Tamworth’s sister-city relationship with Nashville (formalised in June 2013). Mude was engaged by Tamworth Regional Council in 2023 to rebuild the festival’s website, and the council brought us back a few years later to extend the platform into a native mobile app.

Toyota Star Maker is the festival’s career-launching country music talent quest, run during the Tamworth Country Music Festival each January. The prize package is worth more than $100,000 and includes a record deal and twelve months use of a Toyota vehicle. Star Maker has launched some of Australia’s biggest country music careers, including Keith Urban in 1990 and Lee Kernaghan in 1982. Jarrad Wrigley was named the 46th Star Maker at the 2026 festival.

Toyota has been the festival’s title sponsor since January 1994. Toyota’s named placements run across the festival, including Toyota Park (the main free concert venue, ten nights of free shows during the festival), the Toyota FanZone, Toyota Star Maker, and the Toyota Golden Guitar Awards. The sponsor inventory on the festival website is built around these named placements.

Mude rebuilt the Tamworth Country Music Festival’s website in 2023, and was brought back a few years later for the iOS and Android app development that produced the festival’s native mobile app. The work covered the information architecture, the visual design, the custom WordPress component library, the customised event search, the sponsor inventory system, and the operational tools the council team uses to run the festival through the platform.

The brief from Tamworth Regional Council was to rebuild the festival website. The previous site was clunky to navigate, hard for the council team to update without a developer in the room, and unable to filter the festival’s 2,800-plus events by anything useful to a visitor. The rebuild was scoped to fix all of that at the same time, with the website designed around the user segments identified in the discovery work with Tamworth Regional Council.

The “What’s On” feature is the single most-visited part of the festival website. On the previous site it lived inside a third-party WordPress plugin called Eventotron, which couldn’t filter the festival’s 2,800-plus events by anything useful to a visitor trying to plan a day. Mude customised the plugin so it could filter by date, by music genre, by free versus ticketed, by individual artist, and by what’s currently on or coming up in the next hour or two.

The customised search includes a save function so visitors can build a personal itinerary across the festival, and a featured-events surface so the festival can prioritise specific shows commercially without compromising the underlying search results. The same itinerary functionality carries through to the mobile app as the “MyFest” planner, where the audience already in Tamworth can favourite gigs, build a personal schedule, and receive push notifications about their preferred artists.

The Tamworth Country Music Festival app is available on iOS and Android, with the iOS app development and Android app development scoped as a single project alongside the website. The app operates as the audience’s in-festival companion to the website. The app’s central feature is “MyFest”, a custom itinerary planner where a user can favourite gigs and artists across the 2,800-plus events on the program and build a personal schedule for the ten days. The app handles event search by artist, venue, date and genre, mirroring the website’s customised “What’s On” filters.

Additional app features include an “On Now” feed that highlights what’s currently playing or starting in the next two hours, location-aware nearby-venue prompts, maps and navigation across Tamworth’s festival precinct, and push notifications when the user’s favourited artists are about to perform. The app and the website share the same underlying event data, so the council team can manage the festival program in one place and surface it across both digital products.

Tamworth Regional Council’s marketing team operates the festival website for the eleven months a year between major program announcements. The site was built so day-to-day publishing, sponsor placement, event scheduling and the year-to-year content rollover all run through the WordPress CMS, with developer involvement reserved for the changes that genuinely need it.

Three architectural decisions enable that. A custom component library, so the team builds new pages from existing components with predictable visual behaviour. Conditional visibility on every section, so a single page can hold variations that surface based on festival dates, user segment or sponsor tier. Content automation for the year-to-year rollover, so the 2025 program becoming the 2026 program (and the 2026 archive being preserved) doesn’t require a full content rebuild. That same architecture is what let Mude extend the platform into a native app when the festival came back wanting one.

The Tamworth Country Music Festival platform is how Mude approaches local government website design. The website was built so a council team could run the product day to day without ongoing developer involvement. The website handles 2,800-plus events, hundreds of stakeholder applications, sponsor inventory with click-through reporting, and a homepage that automatically reconfigures itself for the festival period. All of it sits inside a single WordPress build that Tamworth Regional Council can operate.

The Tamworth Country Music Festival platform is the case Mude uses for both local government website design and tourism website design. Within the council, Destination Tamworth (the tourism and events division) runs the site as the day-to-day client. The studio’s broader Australian Government work sits in a different part of the practice and includes campaign and identity engagements for the Department of the Prime Minister and Cabinet, Sport Integrity Australia and the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing. The Critical Technology Tracker Mude built for the Australian Strategic Policy Institute sits in the same publisher-runs-it operating model as the Tamworth platform.

Mude is a brand and design studio based in Sydney, Australia. The studio operates as a brand and design studio, a Sydney website development agency, and a WordPress agency in one practice, with brand strategy, brand identity, packaging, video and photography sitting alongside the digital and software work that produced the Tamworth Country Music Festival platform.

Mude’s web and digital practice works with publication clients, government and council clients, cultural institutions, embassies and brand-led consumer businesses across Sydney, Canberra, regional New South Wales and Australia. Brand strategy, visual design, editorial workflow design and WordPress development sit within the same team.