National award for Shrewsbury Folk Festival
The annual Shrewsbury Folk Festival has been named one of the best in the country after picking up a national accolade.
Shrewsbury Folk Festival, which attracted more than 6,000 revellers over four days in August, has won the Fatea Interactive Festival Award for 2012.
Bosses at Fatea magazine, which runs the annual awards ceremony, praised the show for 'reaching out' to people.
Shrewsbury was one of five folk festivals to be honoured in the Fatea Awards 2012 with Cambridge, Shepley, Purbeck and the Great British Folk Festival also recognised.
The town festival, which moved to Shrewsbury from Bridgnorth in 2006, has scooped the interactive award for its strong social media presence and annual webcast of the live main stage performances which this year drew in 27,104 viewers.
People tuned in to the webcast from 49 countries across five continents with viewing figures massively beating the 2011 figure of 14,000 online viewers.
The peak number of people online at one time was 1,209 during the live Sunday night performance of Richard Thompson as people tuned in from the USA, New Zealand, Australia, France, Spain, Japan and Brazil.
Jo Cunningham, a spokeswoman for Shrewsbury Folk Festival, said: "We're obviously delighted and chuffed to bits to have been recognised in this way.
"We've obviously been awarded this due to the good social-networking we do and also our ever-growing webcast which is becoming increasingly popular."
She added: "We're really pleased that our interactivity has been recognised and we hope that the webcast adds to the overall festival experience for people."
In 2012 Shrewsbury Folk Festival at Berwick Road Showground played host to stars such as Richard Thompson, Kate Rusby and Show of Hands.
This year's festival will be held over four days from August 23.
