This study focuses on social sustainability of music events in adolescents’ lives through their perceptions and own words as they describe their live music experiences. Scrutinizing music event attendance from the social sustainability perspective demonstrates that the cultural content per se is not as meaningful as the social network that comes together in such events. The research questions were: How is social sustainability manifested in adolescents’ music event attendance, and what are the implications? The research data comprised the results of a web survey directed at 15–18 year old adolescents. Bonding and bridging, as well as the sense of community, were present in adolescents’ descriptions of live music experiences, producing various forms of well-being effects. The sense of belonging was almost missing from the narratives, which suggests that how adolescents consume music has a decaying interest in the grassroots culture that fosters the sense of belonging. This has major implications for the development of popular culture.

Getting more adolescents to participate in live music would increase the vitality and sustainability of venues and popular music culture. We studied 15–18-year-old Finnish adolescents of Generation Z and their live music consumption habits with the help of segmentation. The research questions were: Why and with whom do adolescents attend live music events? What kind of live music events do adolescents go to? and, What kind of knowledge do these typologies provide about adolescents’ needs from a broader perspective? Considering that there is a vast number of segmentation studies based on event participation motives, it is peculiar that there are no motivational segmentation studies on adolescent event participants. One of the reasons might be that traditionally youth has been considered as a single homogenous consumer segment. Our results showed that adolescent live music event attendees demonstrated different needs. Four segments were identified: adolescents driven either by content, scene, friendship or social factors.   Article cover photo: Jaana Ahvenainen.