Persisting With or Reinventing Music Festivals?

Abstract

Music festivals offer new opportunities for leisure and tourist experiences. The aim of this study is to analyse whether the motivation to persist with music festivals will remain or whether the concept of the music festival should be reinvented. Through a mixed-method approach, this study depicts motivations, perceptions, and behavioural intentions of attending traditional or online festivals with a structural equation model. Content analysis helps to further examine the attitudes of festival goers in the new contexts. They feel safe in traditional festivals if screening units and limited access is implemented, but if social pleasure is to be kept, music festivals should turn to online formats that allow interaction among participants. As such it can be concluded that in this new context, traditional music festivals are still a possibility if safety is ensured; nevertheless, online festivals seem to be the most obvious solution at least while the pandemic situation endures.