Digital Concert Experience: An Online Research Project on Live Streaming During the Pandemic

Digital Concert Experience (DCE) is a research project designed and conducted to contribute to a better understanding of audience experience in online streams of Western classical music in ecologically valid settings. Based on an online survey, a latent profile analysis identified three different audience segments of classical concert streams. These are differentiated by different preferences for stream characteristics. In a subsequent experiment, participants watched one out of four different stream variations and were asked to rate different aspects of their concert experience. Seven main dimensions of concert experience were derived from the questionnaire answers and subsequently analyzed with respect to presented stream variations. Concert streams were found to have the potential to evoke high appreciation of music, but to evoke lower degrees of emotional and immersive experience, according to our results. Social interaction opportunities available during the stream led to increased feelings of social connection. Additional information about a certain piece in the programme had a strong effect on the understanding of it. Moreover, we observed differentiated forms of concert experience within each preference group dependent on presented stream variation. We close the chapter by providing an outlook on our Experimental Concert Research (ECR) project, which aims to holistically explore the concert experience in conventional live concerts with physical co-presence of musicians and audience in an ecologically valid way. Both projects contribute to the empirical study of the classical concert experience with regard to current challenges of classical music in the cultural sector.