CMA Fest
Multi-venue access control and full credentialing across downtown Nashville for one of country music's biggest annual events.
The Country Music Association produces CMA Fest, a four-day festival staging nightly stadium concerts and free daytime shows across downtown Nashville for tens of thousands of fans. Started in 1972 as Fan Fair and renamed CMA Fest in 2018, it bills itself as the longest-running country music festival in the world, and proceeds go to music education in schools through the CMA Foundation.
A festival spread across stadiums, stages, parking, and catering needs both fan-facing access control and tightly managed front- and back-of-house credentials.
We deployed 33 NTR-6 portals plus handhelds on wrstSCN for entry and ticket swaps, added QR scanners for catering and barcode scanners for parking, and ran seven ZC10L printers on Manifest for FOH/BOH credentialing.
Our 2025 debut scanned 17,800 people across five portals and 14 handhelds. For 2026 we scaled to 33 portals and issued 21,500+ RFID credentials spanning badges, SmartCard wristbands, and Chroma wristbands.
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Tell us what you’re building. We’ll show you how one platform, and a crew that shows up, handles access, credentials, payments, and data from load-in to load-out.
Questions? hello@wrstbnd.com