New study identifies three groups of concert stream user

The circumstances of the COVID-19 pandemic have acted as a catalyst for the development of new digital concert formats—from Twitter streams out of the living room to on-demand HD productions in media libraries. To find out which of these forms have potential beyond the pandemic, artistic experiments are just as important as scientific research into the links between formats and audience experiences.

A team of researchers, including the Max Planck Institute for Empirical Aesthetics (MPIEA) in Frankfurt am Main, Germany, has now investigated whether there are different types of audiences for classical concert streams, and has identified three groups with different preferences.

As part of a larger research project on the production and design of digital concert experiences (“Digital Concert Experience”), the research team conducted an online survey of 1,619 viewers of classical concert streams. The participants provided information on their socio-demographics, their experience of using streaming platforms, and their preferences for various possible production features of digital classical music events.

“The framework for concert streams is different from that for live events: it includes aspects of mediatization that can be designed very differently. These features naturally influence the experience and are therefore of great interest for the design and observation of digital concerts,” explains Melanie Wald-Fuhrmann, Director at the MPIEA and senior author of the study.

For example, it is useful to distinguish between live use with and on-demand use without temporal co-presence. In addition, the digital concert experience also depends on the technical characteristics of the presentation platforms and interactive elements, such as the opportunity to interact with other viewers.

Based on the data collected, the researchers were able to identify three groups of audiences with different preferences and usage patterns: More than half of the respondents were “digital concert enthusiasts.” This group is open to innovative and diverse concert features that fully exploit the possibilities of digitality, as well as the use of social media channels.

The “digital concert purists” made up about a third of the users. They prefer traditional concert features and on-demand streams. About 15% of the participants were rather undecided about their preferences, so the researchers accordingly referred to them as “undecided and less engaged concert users.”

The results of the study have recently been published in the Journal of Arts Management, Law, and Society. They show that socio-demographic characteristics and musical preferences have a significant, albeit weak, correlation with membership of the mentioned audience groups.

These findings suggest that producers should develop clearly differentiated types of classical concert streams in order to reach the widest possible audience.