Popular Music Festivals Research Articles

THE ROLE OF MUSIC FESTIVALS IN SHAPING DESTINATION BRANDING AND IMAGE IN TWO HUNGARIAN REGIONAL CENTERS

Urban marketing with culture-led urban development has a growing importance for contemporary cities. In a global competition, cities must stand out and attract tourism, investment, and cultural activities. Consequently, their image should be constantly improved. City branding provides strategies for enhancing a city's public image – thus, becoming more and more attractive. Events and festivals, like popular music festivals, offer valuable opportunities for promoting cities and boosting tourism. The aim of this research is to explore the potential of music festivals in building city image and integrating it into the broader branding processes. The results are based on semi-structured interviews and a questionnaire survey. The findings support the hypothesis that festivals can significantly raise destination awareness, and shape image, and through them, a wider audience can be reached. Festival uniqueness and appropriate venue choices facilitate seamless integration into the host city 's tourism – thus decision-makers should pay attention to this issue and facilitate coordination between stakeholders.

“I didn’t want to promote it with a white girl”: marketing practices and boundary work at popular music festivals

PurposeThis paper aims to explore how music festival organisers negotiate diversity and inclusion in marketing and promotion practices through symbolic and social boundaries.Design/methodology/approachBased on semi-structured interviews with 18 festival organisers in Rotterdam and participant observation with six festival photographers I show that symbolic and social boundaries are employed in three areas: (1) boundaries in festival format (i.e. [partially] free or ticketed), (2) boundaries in distribution partners and technologies and (3) boundaries in promotional content.FindingsSymbolic and social boundaries are intentionally used by festival organisers to build and delineate festival audiences. Implications are drawn on current understandings of the accessibility of music festival spaces, arguing that festival research should move beyond within-space dynamics to grasp the negotiation of diversity and inclusion at festivals more fully.Originality/valueWhile music festivals are often marketed as celebratory spaces that are “welcoming to everyone”, few studies have investigated diversity and inclusion nor marketing and promotion practices at music festivals. This study shows how festival audiences are shaped through marketing and promotion practices.

Spatial and social aspects of the impact of Pol’and’Rock Festival and Jarocin Festival in Poland

Among the popular music festivals operating in Poland in the last forty years, two of them played a special role, especially for their young recipients of amplified music. The first of them was the Rock Festival in Jarocin (it had different names) functioning in the years 1980–1994, so still in the period of communist authorities. Reactivated in 2005, it recently operates under the name Jarocin Festival and uses the legend of the event from the 1980s. In the new socio-political conditions, the second important event, the Pol’and’Rock Festival (called Woodstock Station in 1995–2017), began to function in 1995, which in the late 1990s exceeded 100,000 participants and became the largest popular music event in Poland. The aim of the study is to characterise the impact of these two important popular music festivals in Poland at the turn of the second and third decade of the 21st century in the spatial and socio-cultural dimensions on the community of its participants. Referring to the traditional chorological paradigm of human geography, an analysis of the differentiation of the territorial impact of festivals was made, and using patterns immersed in social geography-oriented music research, factors motivating to participate in festivals were determined.

Splendour XR: Place, Experience and Liveness at a Virtual Music Festival

A popular turn to online live music in response to the COVID-19 pandemic included the staging of so-called virtual music festivals, including Splendour XR, an ‘extended reality’ version of Australia’s largest ticketed music festival in 2021. Where the ‘liveness’ of online performance is now broadly accepted, a virtual music festival necessarily makes a more ambitious claim, as popular music festivals are valued for their construction of certain types of place affording particular kinds of experience. This article considers this claim in light of the history and meaning of popular music festivals, including the role of mediating technologies, before presenting a case study of Splendour XR drawing on primary research at the event. The article explores key issues for the online delivery of popular music festivals including the negotiation of liveness, the construction of place and the music festival experience.

Ladarice

Ladarice are a female vocal nonet founded with the aim of nurturing Croatian musical heritage. Thanks to their extensive activities on the Croatian music scene, a series of performances at traditional folk music and popular music festivals, frequent appearances on radio and television, participation in theatre plays, performances featured in popular Croatian films (for example, the performance of the song Podravina ravna in the TV series Gruntovčani, created by Dubravko Ivančan and Živan Cvitković), Ladarice have evolved into a cultural brand. However, the general public is mostly unaware that the group Ladarice was founded independently of the Lado Ensemble, and that it operated as such until 2008. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the activities of Ladarice from their forming in 1966 to the present day. From the analysed material, it is possible to deduce that, thanks to their of music, they managed to remain active for many years and evolve into a cultural brand. Today, the singers of Ladarice operate within the framework of the Lado Ensemble, while their work differs significantly in terms of primary motivation, the number of singers, the mode of work, and artistic programme.

Making space: Investigating the diversity conundrum for British music festivals

ABSTRACT Culture always speaks to the history and meaning of place. Music festivals in particular carry considerable significance as they are produced through spatial and temporal processes that extend their symbolic and material meaning beyond their local settings. The onset of COVID-19 and the Black Lives Matter (BLM) protests in Bristol intensified debates about festival diversity. Drawing on interviews with Bristol-based festival producers, this article examines popular music festivals and the places, communities and identities they represent. Rather than repeating the common criticism of festivals for being too white, we contribute to the debates by unravelling complex processes embedded within festival production. Using Lefebvre’s concept of conceived space, we argue that (racial) diversity is a spatial conundrum for music festivals. We demonstrate this through the way festival space is conceived: culturally – as it is framed within established music festival discourses; economically – through entrepreneurial networks of independent producers within local music cultures; socially – their ideals (including diversity), tastes and lifestyles inadvertently organise and represent particular symbolic and material formations of (racialised) identities and communities.

Participatory research to monitor lake water pollution

Abstract A participatory research team, concerned about water quality around Lake Geneva, particularly in the Montreux Bay region where some were lifeguards, ran sampling campaigns to determine summertime levels of lake water pollution. The participants were brought together serendipitously through a course organized by academic researchers and ‘biohackers’ from the community laboratory, Hackuarium. After discussion about lifeguards’ gastrointestinal and dermatological ailments each season, the decision to pursue this participatory research project was made. In order to assess water quality, thereby testing the hypothesis that unsuspected pollution enters the lake each summer season, microbiological plating of water samples was proposed. Volunteers collected and analysed water samples over summer seasons (8 weeks in 2016, 2017 and 2020) from three sites around Montreux Bay, with tap and local river water samples as controls. Contamination of lake water was measured using standard microbiological methods, with growth media allowing quantitative assessment of abundance of several bacterial species. In particular, the focus was to quantify Escherichia coli, the classic bioindicator organism for raw sewage contamination. These open science data reveal peaks of bioindicator and other bacterial pollution in lake water samples during all sampling years. For the initial two sampling campaigns, increased microbial burdens occurred during a popular music festival, and were not simply dependent upon rainfall. In contrast, only scattered, lower level bioindicator pollution events occurred across the sampling period during the pandemic summer of 2020, when the festival was cancelled. This study confirms the power of participatory research: dedicated people on a budget can do meaningful environmental monitoring. These analyses suggest that better management, both to support water quality monitoring and for event organization, is essential, as sewage treatment facilities near many popular festivals, internationally, may need to cope with increased wastewater from visitors.

Beyond ‘puffins and moss’: Iceland Airwaves and post-crash musical tourism

AbstractThis article explores relationships between the significant growth of foreign tourism to Iceland, following the 2008 economic crash, and the popular music festival Iceland Airwaves. I consider the effects of Iceland Airwaves on popular music in Reykjavík during the festival and outside of the festival season. My focus is primarily on how the local population experiences Iceland Airwaves and musical tourism in general. Based on ethnographic fieldwork conducted in Iceland between 2010 and 2018, I examine how musicians, politicians, festival management, tourism sector workers, business people, and other music industry workers approach and negotiate the rising role of popular music in Iceland's new tourism economy. This research contributes to broader understandings of how music festivals and musical tourism shape local musical life year-round, and it also offers insight into Iceland's internationally renowned popular music industry.

Introducing the NEMO-Lowlands iconic gesture dataset, collected through a gameful human\u2013robot interaction

This paper describes a novel dataset of iconic gestures, together with a publicly available robot-based elicitation method to record these gestures, which consists of playing a game of charades with a humanoid robot. The game was deployed at a science museum (NEMO) and a large popular music festival (Lowlands) in the Netherlands. This resulted in recordings of 428 participants, both adults and children, performing 3715 silent iconic gestures for 35 different objects in a naturalistic setting. Our dataset adds to existing collections of iconic gesture recordings in two important ways. First, participants were free to choose how they represented the broad concepts using gestures, and they were asked to perform a second attempt if the robot did not recognize their gesture the first time. This provides insight into potential repair strategies that might be used. Second, by making the interactive game available we enable other researchers to collect additional recordings, for different concepts, and in diverse cultures or contexts. This can be done in a consistent manner because a robot is used as a confederate in the elicitation procedure, which ensures that every data collection session plays out in the same way. The current dataset can be used for research into human gesturing behavior, and as input for the gesture recognition and production capabilities of robots and virtual agents.

Analyzing online search patterns of music festival tourists

Music festivals, as cultural events that induce tourism flows, intermediate both the cultural and travel experience. The present study analyzes online search behavior of potential attenders to a music festival. We hypothesize that the search process reveals latent patterns of behavior of cultural tourists planning to attend music festivals. To this end, information from Google Trends on queries related to three popular music festivals is used to build a network of search topics. Based on it, alternative exponential random graph model specifications are estimated. Findings support the general result of mediated information flows: music festivals induce planning and traveling queries. However, differences relating to the specificities of the cultural event are also found, in particular those regarding what nodes or queries supply the network with more useful information.

The characteristics of a Finnish metal fan: Comparative study on music festival attendees

Metal is exceptionally popular and widely approved at all levels of Finnish society. But what are the Finnish metal fans like? Even though there are studies on how metal fans relate to the metal community and how they construct their identity, studies on metal festival audiences are scarce. Here, Finnish metal festival attendees are studied to find out how they differ from the participants of other popular music festivals in demographics, live music consumption and preferences in festival experiences. This is done using a mixed methods research approach. The most interesting finding concerns sex and self-perceived gender position. So far, female metal fans have been studied qualitatively, demonstrating how they represent and perceive themselves inside the male-dominant metal community. We present a new finding, using quantitative data, where both male and female metal fans consider themselves more masculine than the participants of other festivals. The importance of the community was confirmed. In a metal festival, there is a dual community effect: the festival community forms a temporary, open-minded enclave that is common for all the festivals. In a metal festival, the audience comprises also members of the more permanent metal community. A strong sense of community originates from the shared musical preference, demonstrated by a loyal festival attendance and a common symbol system. From the organizer’s point of view, metal festival fans are a grateful audience since they are loyal and earn more than other festival attendees, being willing to invest time and money for their fandom.

Popular music festivals: An examination of the relationship between festival programs and attendee motivations

Popular music festivals: An examination of the relationship between festival programs and attendee motivations

A Study on the Brand Equity Components of Popular Music Festivals and Its relative Importance based on the Audience’s Experience Level

대중음악 페스티벌은 2000년대 이후 급격한 성장을 이루어 온라인 음원산업과 더불어 대중음악산업의 주요 부분을 차지하고 있다. 특히 대중음악 페스티벌은 한 번의 비용 지불로 다양한 국내외 장르별 유명 아티스트의 라인업을 동시에 감상할 수 있다는 장점으로 인해 비약적인 발전을 이루어 왔으며, 일부 대중음악 페스티벌은 유명세와 해를 이은 성공으로 브랜드화하고 있는 실정이다. 따라서, 본 연구에서는 이러한 대중음악 페스티벌의 브랜드 자산을 구성하는 주요 요인을 확인하고, 이러 한 요인들이 관객들의 행위에 미치는 영향력을 분석하였다. 또한 관객의 참여 경험 수준에 따른 조절효과를 분석하여 대중음악 페스티벌의 브랜드 자산 구성요인에 따른 차별화된 마케팅 전략을 제시하였다. 연구결과는 대중음악 페스티벌의 브랜드 자산 구성요인은 브랜드 인지도, 브랜드 이미지, 브랜드 품질, 브랜드 가치, 브랜드 애호도, 그리고 브랜드 충성도의 6 가지로 분석되었다. 또한 이러한 브랜드자산 구성요인들은 모두 관객의 행위에 유의한 영향을 미치며, 그 중에서도 브랜드 가치가 가장 큰 영향력을 미치는 것으로 확인되었다. 그리고, 여섯 가지 브랜드자산 구성요인들과 관객 행위 간의 관계에서 관객의 경험수준은 각 구성요인의 특징으로 인해 정의 영향 혹은 부의 영향을 미치는 것으로 분석되었다. 따라서, 대중음악 페스티벌의 브랜드 자산을 구성하는 개별 요소들의 특징과 관객의 경험 수준을 세밀히 파악하고 이들간의 관계와 영향을 면밀히 고려하여 관객의 개발과 참여를 적극 유도할 수 있는 효과적이고 능률적인 대중 음악 페스티벌의 기획, 제작 및 마케팅/홍보 전략의 적용이 필요하다.The popular music concerts and festivals industry has been growing in las decade. In particular, the popular music festivals has grown rapidly due to its own capability of giving a variety of joys to the audiences. However, there is few research efforts on this new entertainment industry, especially on how to plan, compose, and provide festival services successfully, and how audiences experience the festival. In this study, we investigate the brand equity components of the popular music festival and relative importance of such components based on the audiences’ experience level. we believe that our research result will play an important role in fostering the popular music festivals industry.

대중음악축제 체험요소가 주관적 행복감과 축제 만족도에 미치는 영향

The purpose of this study is to investigate the effects of popular music festival experiential factors on subjective well being and festival satisfaction, and analyze the effect of popular music festival satisfaction on subjective well being. In order to achieve the purpose of the study, previous studies that applied the experience economy theory of Pine and Gilmore(1998) were reviewed and questionnaire surveys were conducted with participants of the Incheon Pentaport Rock Festival. From the surveys, 237 valid samples were secured and an empirical analysis was conducted with the samples. The results of this study are as follows. First, the entertainment experiential factors, educational experiential factors, escapist experiential factors, and esthetic experiential factors of popular music festivals had statistically significant effects on festival satisfaction. Second, the educational experiential factors and esthetic experiential factors of popular music festivals had significant effects on subjective well being. However, the entertainment experiential factors and escapist experiential factors did not significantly affect subjective well being. Third, the popular music festival satisfaction had significant effects on subjective well being. Therefore, the importance of experiential factors as a strategy to enhance the feeling of welling being and satisfaction of participants in the popular music festivals could be identified. In addition, the application optimal experiential factors (the optimal experience) to the planning, operating and marketing of the popular music festivals will contribute to strengthening the competitiveness of the festivals.

대중음악축제의 서비스 품질이 지각된 가치, 고객 만족도 및 축제 재방문 의도에 미치는 영향

In South Korea, the popular music festival, starting at the middle of the first decade of 21century, have growed rapidly in a short period and become an industry though related researches. By studying the value of the event and conducting researches aiming at improving service quality and customer satisfaction, the revisit intention can be improved while the sustainability of the popular music festivals can be ensured. By examining the relationship of service quality, perceived value, customer satisfaction and revisit intention, the study aims at giving suggestions about designing and operating the popular music festival.<BR> In conclusion, perceived value positively affects customer satisfaction, which has positive effect on revisit intention. Moreover, the designer and operator of the popular music festival should make efforts to improve the customer satisfaction of participants by understanding the importance of service quality, perceived value, experience and image of the event.

Reading Popular Music Festivals through the Lens of Public Sphere

The core idea of Jurgen Habermas public sphere has to do with forming a public made of private individuals who participate in civic dialogue on issues of common interest. A public so formed generates public opinion through the formation of a communicative network. This essay argues that the communicative network of the public sphere which is known to be strengthened by its cultural connects through press and mass media can also be shaped by popular music culture like hip-hop, rock or electronic dance music. A cultural public sphere is comprised of numerous networks of mass and popular culture which help in shaping the participants’ articulations of politics, both public and personal. Cultural public sphere marks the entry of affective modes of communication as effectual participation in the politics of everyday life. In this article, the author tries to position the role of popular music cultures in the formation of a public sphere by studying three distinct forms of popular music- hip-hop, rock and electronic dance music. The idea is to understand the role of the communities formed due the affective mode of popular music and the efficacies granted to these social groups in the larger context of a public sphere. Another important dimension of studying these forms of popular music is to understand music festivals as active sites for the realisation of a public sphere. Drawing from Durkheim’s idea of how festivals harness within them a ‘collective effervescence’ which he found to be an integral element to aid in instilling feelings of solidarity in a community, this essays tries to locate the popular music festival sites within the framework of a cultural public sphere by conducting an in depth literature review on how the traditional public sphere is critiqued from the vantage point of a cultural public sphere; how popular culture texts and practices inform these critiques and finally how music festival sites act as public spheres.

A Study on the Relationship among Participation Constraints, Constraints Negotiation and Participation Intention in Popular Music Festival.

A Study on the Relationship among Participation Constraints, Constraints Negotiation and Participation Intention in Popular Music Festival.

‘The most atypical experience of my life’: The experience of popular music festivals on cruise ships

This article considers the growing phenomenon of music festivals on cruise ships. These commercial events, partnerships between event companies and shipping lines, celebrate a particular genre of music and occur aboard a cruise ship. The views of 138 festivalgoers primarily concentrated within six festivals were considered. According to these sources, the festival experience of these events is centred on three factors: live performances, interaction with fellow festivalgoers and star musicians (collectively referred to as ‘ship fam’), and interaction with the constructed space of the cruise ship. Cruise ship music festivals are a different type of music festival, still occurring within festival space, but within the mobile experiential cocoon of a cruise ship.

The ‘gay Olympics’? The Eurovision Song Contest and the politics of LGBT/European belonging

The politics of gay and transgender visibility and representation at the Eurovision Song Contest, an annual televised popular music festival presented to viewers as a contest between European nations, show that processes of interest to Queer International Relations do not just involve states or even international institutions; national and transnational popular geopolitics over ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights’ and ‘Europeanness’ equally constitute the understandings of ‘the international’ with which Queer International Relations is concerned. Building on Cynthia Weber’s reading the persona of the 2014 Eurovision winner Conchita Wurst with ‘queer intellectual curiosity’, this article demonstrates that Eurovision shifted from, in the late 1990s, an emerging site of gay and trans visibility to, by 2008–2014, part of a larger discursive circuit taking in international mega-events like the Olympics, international human-rights advocacy, Europe–Russia relations and the politics of state homophobia and transphobia. Contest organisers thus had to take positions — ranging from detachment to celebration — about ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender’ politics in host states and the Eurovision region. The construction of spatio-temporal hierarchies around attitudes to lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights, however, revealed exclusions that corroborate other critical arguments on the reconfiguration of national and European identities around ‘lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender equality’.

Festival space: gender, liminality and the carnivalesque

Purpose– Contemporary outdoor rock and popular music festivals offer liminoidal spaces in which event participants can experience characteristics associated with the carnivalesque. Festival goers celebrate with abandonment, excess and enjoy a break from the mundane routine of everyday life. The purpose of this paper is to explore the way gender is negotiated in the festival space.Design/methodology/approach– The rock and popular music tribute festival, known as “Glastonbudget” provides the focus for this conceptual paper. A pilot ethnographic exploration of the event utilising photographic imagery was used to understand the way in which gender is displayed.Findings– It is suggested that liminal zones offer space to invert social norms and behave with abandonment and freedom away from the constraints of the everyday but neither women nor men actually take up this opportunity. The carnivalesque during Glastonbudget represents a festival space which consolidates normative notions of gender hierarchy via a complicated process of othering.Research limitations/implications– This is a conceptual paper which presents the need to advance social science-based studies connecting gender to the social construction of event space. The ideas explored in this paper need to be extended and developed to build upon the research design established here.Originality/value– There is currently a paucity of literature surrounding the concept of gender within these festival spaces especially in relation to liminality within events research.