From headliners to hangovers: Digital media communication in the British rock music festival experience

Abstract

Extant tourist experience literature focuses on ‘live’ space and time activity, while pre- and post-components are often neglected despite the opportunities offered by increasing use of digital media communication (DMC). Focusing especially on the pre-festival experience but also addressing peri- and post-phases, this study examines the role of DMC in tourists’ experiences at British rock music festivals. Interviews with festivalgoers revealed three core and inter-related themes: information, emotional response and communitas. Initial engagement with DMC enabled planning, generated feelings of anticipatory excitement and created a sense of communitas. Online activity reduced peri-festival but continued to enhance the live event experience, while the virtual communitas was extended at the post-festival phase.

Mining and exploring electronic word-of-mouth from Twitter: case of the Java Jazz Festival

“…Brown et al (2019) claimed that digital media communication generally occurs before a festival begins and least during the festival. However, their claim contrasts with the findings of this research.…”

“…Also, through co-creation in Finland, festival organisers can innovate through new service development (Pasanen and Konu, 2016). Brown et al (2019) found that SM served as an information portal, a means of expressing emotions and a place of community for fellow visitors to three rock music festivals in the UK.…”

“…2. Tweet frequency differences in this study refer to the variability of the total number of tweets posted in different periods (Brown et al , 2019). …”

“…This region accounts for a relatively large market share of the global music festival sector (Guo et al , 2017; Nakayama and Wan, 2018; IFPI, 2019). This study is a response to the call by Ogbeide et al (2020) and Brown et al (2019) for more extensive research on big data analytics and tourism, particularly in creative industries. They argued that researchers interested in these fields should be able to integrate the latter with data analytics to understand digital media communication or eWOM on the SM platform and how data analytics can contribute to the music festival sector.…”

Innovation in agricultural and county shows: conceptualising the e-eventscape

“…As well as the physical event-based innovation and network innovations, a range of online tools and user engagement channels have emerged in the events sector to create digital innovation opportunities and extended engagement with audiences before and after events (Brown et al , 2020). Earlier applications of digital technology in the events sector was largely developed for behind the scenes “process innovations” (Hjalager, 2010) such as online bookings, payments and marketing.…”