Socialization or genre appreciation: the motives of music festival participants

Abstract

Purpose Academic studies have sought to understand the motivations of festival and event attendees usually through single-event case studies. This approach has failed to generate a generalizable set of motivation items. In addition, there is increasing criticism in the literature of the common methodological framework used in festival motivation studies, due to a perceived over-reliance on motivations derived from the broader tourism and travel research, with too little attention to event-specific factors. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues by analyzing a sub-category of motivation studies, music festivals, in order to see if this approach can elicit a consistent set of motivation dimensions for the sub-category, which can in turn be compared and contrasted with the broader literature. A new case study of motivations to attend the 28th Macau International Music Festival (MIMF) is included to complement the existing music festival sub-category by adding a classical music and music festivals in Asia. Design/methodology/approach Motivation dimensions important to music festivals are compared to dimensions across the broader festival motivation literature to find similarities and differences. Factor analysis is used to identify the motivation dimensions of attendees at the MIMF and the results are compared to those of existing music festival studies. Findings Music festival goers are shown to be primarily motivated by the core festival offering, the music, in contrast to festival attendees in general, where socialization has emerged as the primary motivating element. The results of the additional case study support these findings. Originality/value In contrast to previous research, this study examines the possibility of identifying common motivations among festival attendees through studying festivals by sub-categories.

Analysis of the Influence of the Selected Aspects of Organisation of a Mass Event Upon the Security of Participants in It

“…It ought to be emphasised that mass events are a very specific product (Kruger & Saayman, 2017), and conducting them effectively requires identifying and perfecting the aspects exerting a particularly significant influence upon customer satisfaction (Drengner et al, 2010;Geus et al, 2016), and also customer loyalty (Yuan & Jang, 2008;Black, 2016). In accordance with the opinion of the authors of this dissertation, apart from the aspects connected with the choice of a venue, and also with the repertoire of the event (Vinnicombe & Sou, 2017), what becomes particularly important, is the aspects connected with extensively interpreted security. It goes without saying that the aspect of security has been becoming more and more significant in the recent years, and quite frequently it determines whether a decision taken is that to participate in a mass event (Hajduczenia et al, 2011).…”

Segmentation of music festival attendees

“…2016), to a priori segmentation based on the answers to one selected question (Formica & Uysal, 1995;Oakes, 2010;Thrane, 2002;Vinnicombe & Sou, 2017), and a mixed (Prentice & Andersen, 2003) or qualitative (Mackellar, 2009) approach (see Table 1 for details). The most used perspective for the segmentation of music festival attendees is motivation.…”

“…The most used perspective for the segmentation of music festival attendees is motivation. Other segmentation variables are demographics , origin (locals vs. non-locals;Formica & Uysal, 1995;Vinnicombe & Sou, 2017; see also Kottemann et al 2018), musical preferences (Pérez-Gálvez et al, 2017), behaviour or behavioural intentions (Kruger & Saayman, 2017;Mackellar, 2009), consumption (Oakes, 2010;Thrane, 2002), activities (Prentice & Andersen, 2003) and perceptions on event attributes (like sponsors, recycling and services; Kinnunen & Haahti, 2015). The sample sizes of music festival segmentation studies are predominantly very small, in many cases even too small for the segmentation variables that were used (Mooi & Sarstedt, 2011).…”

Between Fire and Ice: Experiences of the Persian Fire Festival in a Nordic Setting

“…For example, studies by Yolal et al, [53] and Gunlu and Laleh [54] showed that there are differences in motivation between visitors who participate in different types of festivals. Vinnicombe and Sou [55] and Brown and Knox [56] confirmed that music festival visitors participate mainly for the sake of music and nothing else. Differently from them, Attanasi et al [4,6] showed in their studies on Greek-language minorities' music festival in southern Italy that traditional festival visitors participate mainly for the festival's cultural identity and the local traditions it represents.…”