Audience Members’ Motivation,Satisfaction, and Intention to Re-visit an Ethnic Minority Cultural Festival

This study investigates the relationships among audience members' motivation, satisfaction, and re-visit intentions at an ethnic minority cultural festival. As an empirical study, an on-site survey was conducted at the 2009 Fe?ta–Croatian Food and Wine Festival in Adelaide, South Australia. The results of the study identified eight main motivational dimensions for ethnic minority cultural festival attendance: “community support,” “escape,” “knowledge/education,” “food, wine, and entertainment,” “novelty,” “family togetherness,” “marketing,” and “socialization.” The findings of this study also confirm the implication that festival audience members' motivation is an immediate antecedent of overall satisfaction and likelihood of future attendance, and that the level of a festival audience members' overall satisfaction has a direct impact on the likelihood of future attendance. These findings offer important implications for public or private festival and event organizations, state governments, and local communities that have an interest in creating and staging ethnic minority cultural festivals.     

Social impacts of music festivals: Does culture impact locals' attitude toward events in Serbia and Hungary?

There is growing interest among academics in examining the impacts of festivals on host communities. This paper constitutes novel research in that it applies the Festival Social Impact Attitude Scale (FSIAS) to two large-scale music festivals of Exit (Serbia) and Sziget (Hungary). Furthermore, it explores the moderating effect of Hofstede's national cultural dimensions on residents' perception of the impacts of these festivals on their communities. The study identifies the underlying dimensions of their social impacts and reveals how the cultural dimensions of the two different nations relate to resident perception of the impacts of the festivals. The results reveal a six-factorial substructure that represents two main (positive and negative) dimensions of large-scale music festivals and suggests that national culture significantly influences local perception of festival impacts on communities. The study concludes with the theoretical and practical implications of the study and advances future lines of research.     

Book Reviews

European American ethnic festivals play an important role in the maintenance of folk traditions and ethnic identity in America. Many of these festivals were established during a mid-twentieth-century period of diminishing Old World identity among second and third generation immigrants. The celebrations sought not only to revive ethnic identification by highlighting customs such as cuisine, music and dance, but also to boost the local economy by tapping into a burgeoning tourism destination market. Wilber, Nebraska, home to a large population of Czech Americans, resurrected such a festival in 1962 that had not been celebrated since 1937, and this paper explores a number of geographical, historical, cultural and political factors contributing to its initial and continued popularity as a regional ethnic festival. Also discussed are the commodified cultural items, including food, polka music, craftwork and traditional clothing that provide Czech Americans a means to engage in and maintain a satisfying level of ethnic identity without exerting significant amounts of money and time. The Czech Festival continues to benefit Wilber economically with tens of thousands of tourist visits each year, and surveys indicate that the maintenance of ethnic customs and identity in the community is increasingly becoming dependent on the festival.     

Music Festivals and Social Inclusion – The Festival Organizers’ Perspective

There is growing interest in how festivals can help to build strong and cohesive communities, particularly whether they can reach a broad swathe of the population or operate as enclaves. This article explores ways in which festival organizers may contribute to social inclusion goals through a qualitative phenomenological study of music festivals. Findings suggest that these festival organizers may contribute to social inclusion across four areas of society—consumption, production, political engagement, and social interaction or communitas—through factors such as providing opportunities for local participation, learning new skills, and access to education about social justice. However, it appears that these festival organizers tended to direct their social inclusion efforts toward portable communities, focusing on attendees but failing to reach out to local residents. This limits their ability to embrace the local community in its broadest sense, and calls into question their likelihood of achieving inclusivity outcomes.     

Problematising ‘Festival Tourism’: Arts Festivals and Sustainable Development in Ireland

This paper problematises the term ‘festival tourism’. It conceptualises festivals as socially sustaining devices and argues that while they frequently function as tourist attractions, their social significance extends far beyond tourism. Using empirical material gathered in two case study arts festivals in Ireland, the paper demonstrates how festivals can contribute to arts development by inter alia creating demand for the arts, enhancing venue infrastructures, encouraging local creativity and animating local involvement. The paper contends that arts festivals, irrespective of their initial objectives almost inevitably develop tourist profiles over time and it proceeds to examine how changing tourism priorities in the two festivals studied impact upon sustainable festival practices. The findings suggest that tourism emerged as a key force promoting festival growth and expansion. It was found to be associated with increased revenue flows but also with increased arts activity on a year-round basis and with an improved venue infrastructure in both places. However, problems were identified with respect to the quality of the relationship forged between the festivals and local populations in the respective places. The paper concludes by arguing that festivals’ engagement with tourism needs to be carefully managed in the interests of promoting the socially sustaining function of festivals and of encouraging sustainable approaches to tourism development.     

Should there be more showers at the summer music festival? Studying the contextual dependence of resource consuming conventions and lessons for sustainable tourism

Summer music festivals that involve a few days of camping have often been linked to sustainability agendas. Yet relevant studies have so far overlooked how these events can themselves serve as experiments in less resource consumptive living. Building on a wider interest in the cultural evolution of cleanliness norms, this paper explores how attendees come to use water in personal washing at two UK festivals. Through survey, observation and interview research, it examines how current festival goers respond to the disruption of their usual washing regimes, paying particular attention to how a combination of social and infrastructural cues serves to encourage the emergence of a temporary new cleanliness culture. Doing so highlights the value of seeing human resource consumption as a matter of dynamic collective convention more than fixed personal preference since these respondents were seen to embrace a new relationship with washing that was otherwise deemed unthinkable. This leads to a broader discussion of how visitor needs and the social world are most usefully studied by both future festival organisers and the wider field of sustainable tourism research.     

Unobserved heterogeneity in music festivalgoers' experience processing

Special events, including festivals, play an essential role in increasing destination attractiveness. Therefore, destination managers who understand festivalgoers' unique needs and priorities can increase the competitive advantages of their destinations in the contemporary experience economy. Accordingly, this study establishes a theoretical model explaining the relationships among festival-experiencescape elements and memorable festival experiences. Additionally, it adopts advanced segmentation approaches to delineate different types of music festivalgoers, to facilitate the development of more precise marketing and management strategies. Specifically, a finite mixture partial least squares technique, multi-group analysis, and importance-performance map analysis were performed with a representative sample of 384 Taiwanese festivalgoers. Combining the findings obtained from three above-mentioned types of analyses yielded two unique types of festivalgoers: ‘experiencescape-oriented’ and ‘seriously involved’. Each type has a distinctive way of assessing festival experiencescapes and creating memorable experiences within them. Managerial implications tailored to these two segments are also provided.     

Perceived crowding and festival experience: The moderating effect of visitor-to-visitor interaction

The purpose of this study is to explore the influence of two types of perceived crowding (spatial crowding and human crowding) on festival experience as well as how the interactions among visitors moderate the relationship by introducing the variable ‘visitor-to-visitor interaction’. To this end, taking Chinese local cultural festivals as the research object, empirical tests with regression analysis are conducted on 555 questionnaires concerning people's festival experience and perception of spatial crowding and human crowding. The results reveal an inverted U-shaped relationship between perceived human crowding and festival experience, whereas perceived spatial crowding consistently negatively affects the festival experience. Furthermore, the moderating effect of interactions among visitors is confirmed: the quality of interaction has different moderating effects on the relationship between different types of crowding perception and festival experience, and the quantity of interaction positively moderates the relationship between perceived spatial crowding and festival experience.     

The way of generation Y enjoying Jazz festival: a case of the Korea (Jarasum) music festival

ABSTRACT

Research studies about the attributes of music festival experiences and the effect of information technology in music festival help us to understand Millennials. With the purpose of providing more insights about the perception and behavior of young people at a festival, this study aims to investigate how festival attributes and the interactivity of information sources affect festival attendee satisfactions and behavioral intentions in a music festival. The results are expected to assist festival organizers in managing and implementing market-oriented service strategies to improve the quality of festivals and therefore to enhance the attendee satisfactions and their behavioral intentions.     

Examining the relationships among festivalscape,experiences, and identity: evidence from two Taiwanese aboriginal festivals

Despite an increase in the number of studies on aboriginal festivals, little empirical research has examined how the organisers of these festivals influence visitors’ sense of festival identity by promoting identifiable factors in their promotional materials. This study thus examines the relationship between the festivalscape, emotional and authenticity experiences, and festival identity among the attendees of two major aboriginal festivals held in July and December in Taiwan. A total of 901 usable questionnaires were collected. Our empirical results suggest that programme planning and the facilities of the festivalscapes positively and significantly affect the emotional experience at both festivals. Furthermore, the emotional experience and the authenticity experience positively and significantly affect festival identity at both festivals. Our findings contribute to efforts to understand the behaviour of festival attendees. Managerial implications and future research directions for aboriginal festival tourism are presented.     

The role of moderating variables on music festival volunteer management

The growth and popularity of festivals and events has led to a need for examination of volunteer program management. An increase in music festivals in the United States in the last decade has resulted in managers recruiting and managing volunteers to operate music festivals. This research examines relationships between moderating variables and factors of self-image congruency, motivation, satisfaction, and intent to return as a volunteer at Austin City Limits, a large-scale music festival in the United States. This research demonstrates the benefit of incorporating self-concept theory in volunteer, event, and tourism research and provides practical implications for practitioners who manage volunteer programs.     

“Go Out on the Weekends to the Forest,Get Trashed and Dance”: Residual Behaviors and Reconfigured Environments at Psychedelic Trance Festivals

ABSTRACT

Psytrance music festivals provide familiar environments, typically outside city limits, where release is sought from daily reality, working routines, or common sense. While sharing these goals with other leisure activities, the festivals also aim for the actualization of encountering unknown or alien destinations. This journey is enabled by the media ecology of the festival, which notably includes the effects of psychedelic drugs. Drawing on ethnographic research of Melbourne-based festivals, this article explores the cultural meanings of getting “trashed” or “wasted” on psychedelic drugs within the outdoor festival environment. The partygoers' temporary retreat into nature ties into the theme of an exile that traces back to the 1960s and still pervades psychedelic culture. This article reworks this theme by addressing the ironic reconfiguration of nature at psytrance festivals, where excessive media consumption leads to an authentic way to connect our urban cultures with nature in its contemporary unauthenticity.     

Impact of government policy and environment quality on visitor loyalty to Taiwan music festivals: Moderating effects of revisit reason and occupation type

Tourists' repeat patronage is a prerequisite for sustainable festivals. Past studies have examined tourist cognition, affection, and conation to festivals. Government involvement in festivals has increased during the past decade; however, few studies have examined how government policy and environment quality influence visitor loyalty to festivals. Using sample data collected from 931 visitors during spring music festivals held in Southern Taiwan, this study used a structural equation model (SEM) with latent variables to examine these influences. The results suggest that government policy positively influences perceived environment quality, visitor satisfaction, and loyalty to festivals. Furthermore, the results from a multigroup SEM approach reveal that tourists' revisit reason (revisit festival versus other) and occupation type (student versus nonstudent) moderate the relationships between government policy and festival loyalty. Implications on festival planning and government policymaking are discussed.     

Glastonbury: managing the mystification of festivity

The realm of music festivity has grown into a global circuit that responds to the demand for emotive experiential products and taps into postmodern themes that celebrate a lifestyle attitude of extended youth. This paper investigates the phenomenon of festival culture through a case study of Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts. It highlights how modern music festivals have become sites of mediated brand management where commodified hyper-experiences are considered as new forms of contested cultural capital. Through a critical conceptual matrix that combines the work of Bourdieu, Pine and Gilmore, and Jensen the authors critically explore the interplay between the experiential dimension, mystical and fantasy narratives and the political contestation of festivity. Focusing on Glastonbury Festival of Contemporary Performing Arts 2010 the study presents an innovative interpretation of festivity through multi and social media. The authors argue that, while promoted as an ethical festival that celebrates its anti-commercial countercultural cool, Glastonbury reflects a modern cathedral of consumption where experiences are the mediated and managerially puppeteered capital of the field. However, festivity is moving beyond management as it is increasingly dependant on the co-creative social media activity of consumers to perpetuate the fantasy and capital of festivity.     

Festival visiting,voluntary risk and positive health

Many disciplines including geography, tourism and event management, anthropology, sociology, psychology, public health and medicine have a contribution to make to the study of festivals. Despite a growing body of tourism and event literature outlining the many motivations for and subjective benefits of attending festivals, the reporting of positive health outcomes remains underdeveloped. Researching festival visitors who take risks for pleasure (voluntary risk-taking or ‘edgework’), would make an important and illuminating contribution to the literature and could offer alternative and broader perspectives on what we define as ‘health’. Interdisciplinary research collaborations using universally accepted definitions, methodologies and measures offer great potential to further our understanding of positive health and voluntary risk-taking from the perspective of the festival visitor.     

Segmenting and Profiling the Portuguese Festival-Goers Through the Most Ancient Form of Music Retailing: The Music Festivals

This article intends to segment and profile the festival-goers in Portugal, and through a mixed mode survey of 657 Portuguese citizens using latent segments models, a three-segment solution was achieved: music lovers, 53%; networkers, 33%; and tourists, 14%. The majority of the festival-goers, the music lovers, consider Optimus Alive the most memorable festival because of the music and these results should be conveniently used for music retailing purposes. The model identified the demographic factors that contributed the most to the solution, and according to each segment, several recommendations to festivals organizations are presented.     

A Segmentation of Volunteers at the 2013 Austin City Limits Music Festival: Insights and Future Directions

Volunteers at music festivals play a critical role in festival operation and success. As the music festival industry continues to grow, the ability for these large productions to effectively execute a large volunteer program is augmented. Volunteers from the 2013 Austin City Limits Music Festival were surveyed in regards to their self-image congruency, motivation, satisfaction, and intent to return as a volunteer at the festival. Analysis resulted in three distinct segments which has significant practical implications for festival management. Academic implications exist with the addition of self-image congruency and further discovery of volunteers in the festival and event industry.     

Segmenting tourists to aboriginal cultural festivals: An example in the Rukai tribal area, Taiwan

Festivals are increasingly being used as instruments for promoting tourism and boosting the regional economy. Festivals are a type of cultural events and are travel attractions with unique features. Much research, undertaken from a variety of perspectives, exists on festivals. However, very few studies related to aboriginal cultures have been published. The main objective of this study is to profile tourists based upon their motives and demographic characteristics, as these traits are associated with attraction to aboriginal cultural festivals and other related activities. The research reveals that cultural exploration, among other motivational dimensions, is the most important factor attracting tourists to the aboriginal cultural festival. In addition, not all tourists have the same degree of interest in the festival cultural experience. Furthermore, motivational variables are found to be more important than demographic variables in explaining and segmenting visitors to an aboriginal festival.     

Celebration of heritage: linkages between historical re-enactment festival attributes and attendees’ value perception

ABSTRACT

Community-based festivals celebrate a sense of community and place. Communities across the United States (US) and elsewhere have turned to various community-based events to celebrate local heritage and culture. This study investigates the relationship between the attributes of a historical re-enactment festival and participants’ perceived value. Drawing on means–end theory and event experience literature, we examined event attributes, perceived benefits, and attendees’ perceived value in the context of a historical re-enactment festival in the Midwestern US. The results highlighted the importance of four attributes of historical re-enactment festivals, namely historical re-enactment, social interactions, event design, and physical facets. Each factor contributed differently to attendees’ perceived value of such a festival experience. In addition, perceived benefits of attending such an event mediated the relationships between event attributes and perceived value. Theoretical and managerial implications of these findings are discussed.     

Evaluating the efficiency of Korean festival tourism and its determinants on efficiency change: Parametric and non-parametric approaches

Local festivals may leverage local specialties and various historical, cultural, and artistic resources throughout their respective regions to attract tourists, inducing positive economic impacts. In this study, this paper is a first attempt to analyze the relative efficiency of local festival tourism by using parametric and non-parametric approaches with the data from local festivals held in Korea from 2015 to 2018. We also deal with the efficiency determinants of each typology of festivals by employing a truncated regression with double bootstrapping. Results showed that the leading sources of inefficiency were primarily embedded in pure technology inefficiency, while the principal operational drivers posed different effects depending on the typology of festivals. These insights have important practical implications for the local festival organizing committees and operators in Korea and are helpful in developing tailored operational strategies to maximize the efficiency among different typologies of festivals.