History & Future

It was once our ambition to help country music out of his niche existence, because most people, especially in Europe, associate country music with a campfire, cowboys, whiskey drinkers and line dancers!

That is not country music! Country music is much more than the byproducts of society, which do not always work in the favor of this music!

Above all, it is a shame that nowadays line dancing dictates the music and if a band or an artist does not do what they want – because some can only dance to a certain type of music – then they are no longer booked by event organizers because the line dancers then boycott them! A real dancer can dance on everything, if the rhythm allows. We know what we talking about, because  Gaby worked for the NTA in Las Vegas as teacher, to teacher the line dance instructors. That is also the reason, why we only have an audience that listens and we have no line dancing at our shows! We have nothing against line dancers, it just doesn’t fit with our award show!

Very few people are aware that many musical genres in developed out of country music!

Country is a musical genre originating from the USA and Australia, which emerged at the beginning of the 20th century from traditional elements of folk music, particularly from Immigrants from Ireland and England. Old-time and bluegrass music and some originally from the southern Appalachian, developed into traditional country music through urban influences and the adoption of other elements such as the blues.

While the traditional returned to the original lyrical and musical themes, creative artists began to experiment with different styles and forms of expression and reached a wide audience with pop and rock influenced styles such as new grass, honky-tonk, western swing and americana.

The mixture of outlaw style and southern rock with rockabilly and traditional blues moved into today’s country rock and country pop and it helped the Nashville sound to break through in the mid-70s. As you can see, the influence on modern music styles is enormously.

Just as the blues had his roots in the African music traditions, which were introduced at the beginning of the 19th century in the southern states of the USA on local instruments such as the guitar, banjo or harmonica –  they are the basic of many popular music genres such as jazz, rock, rock ‘n’ roll and soul, and also can be find in the classical music, based on modern rock and pop music.

***

***   ***   ***

***   ***   ***   ***   ***

***   ***   ***   ***   ***   ***   ***

***   ***   ***   ***   ***

***   ***   ***

***

When we were nominated for our public promotion work for country music in Nashville in 2015, we didn’t win, but received standing ovations from many nominees at that award show. We didn’t even knew, that they knew us!

In 2016 we were honored as the “Best Promotion Company” and in 2017 as “Best Music Industry Magazine” in Nashville and we got twice an award.

Of course, this did not go unnoticed by artists from other musical genres and there were more and more inquiries, as to whether we would promote the country genre alone, or whether other genres could also participate. This due to our original name “Fair Play Country Music”.

Of course, we didn’t want to excluded anyone and thought about how we could help them all. So we decided to gradually re place the now familiar name “Fair Play Country Music” with the abbreviation “FPCM”.

When we made the decision in 2019 to launch an award show for independent artists in Europe, it was initially for the “Fair Play Country Music Awards”; in 2021 we start to change that and from 2022 on, our current brand was created  as “FPCM.Media”.

Of course, we want to do justice to the constantly growing influx of artists from all over the world and strived to become a authority based in Europe that wants to offer all these fantastic artists out there a platform, who unfortunately are often only perceived regionally, so we wanted a platform that brings them the deserved attention to their creative work worldwide. 

Peter and Gaby

***   ***   ***   ***   ***   ***   ***

The following video is not up to date (2023), but shows the aspiration we are pursuing.