Facebook as a platform for co-creating music festival experiences

Abstract

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to address the need to understand how younger music festival-goers use and engage with a music festival’s Facebook page, and how they perceive this social networking service (SNS) as a potential on-line platform for value co-creation. Design/methodology/approach Face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 young adults who attended an annual New Year’s Eve music festival, Rhythm and Vines, in Gisborne, New Zealand. Findings Analysis of the interview data revealed that the majority of participants did not actively engage with this platform and could be categorised as passive viewers or information-seekers. In addition, participants perceived five types of value from using this SNS: functional, social, emotional, interactive and aesthetic value. Even though participants were not segmented due to the small sample size, patterns in their levels of engagement with Facebook, attendance status, reasons for attending the festival and the combinations of forms of value that they perceived were identified. Research limitations/implications Future research should use a large-scale survey method to obtain a representative sample that is generalisable to a specific population of music festival-goers. Practical implications Dominance of features on Facebook providing festival-goers with functional value suggests they prefer a passive or co-optation approach to value co-creation in this context. Due to the limited extent of participants actively co-creating value on this platform, alternative means of encouraging interaction to co-create value with festival-goers should be investigated. Originality/value This study demonstrates that this SNS provides this group of young adults with a means to connect their real-time festival experience, with their on-line Facebook social network during the year.