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The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has once again brought to our attention one of the three main pillars of sustainability–the environment. It has also brought into sharp relief the fragility of the live music festival sector, whose success hinges fundamentally on the capacity for both travel and mass gatherings to occur. Considering this intersection of environmental sustainability and the live music festival sector, this paper–which reports on events occurring long before the global pandemic took hold–examines the ways in which eight Australian folk and world music festivals successfully engage in eco-friendly and pro-environmental practices and educational activities at their events. Findings from this research will assist industry practitioners in being able to engage in similar practices at their events, as well as further academic understandings of the relationship between the environment and the live music sector, and the role of environmental communication practices within this.

This study engaged an exploratory research design using interviews to gain an insight into the perceptions of eight live music festival promoters regarding their patrons' on-site eco-friendly behaviours and engagement with the eco-friendly initiatives at their events.

Social support within the on-site festival community (applied here through the notion of a sense of communitas), coupled with the provision of eco-friendly initiatives and effective environmental communication approaches, were key pivot drivers to support patrons' pro-environmental behaviours. Engagement with environmental authorities and experts during the festivals was found to validate their eco-friendly approaches.

This paper provides details of, as well as insights into, the success of the eco-friendly and pro-environmental education practices engaged at select world and folk music festivals in Australia. It broadens and builds upon existing understandings of environmental communication practices.

The aim of this research paper is to examine why concert promoters sometimes advertise sold‐out live music shows when nobody can buy tickets any longer.

Durkheim's theory of religion as a thrilling social activity is used to hypothesize that the advertising of sold‐out events reminds audiences that star performers are popular and therefore helps to generate the “buzz” around them. Interviews with a series of promoters from the USA, UK and Canada revealed, however, that they see more immediate and mundane reasons for advertising sold‐out shows, including building the artist's career profile and training consumers to buy next time round.

It was found that promoters could also organize the sales and advertising process to bring sold‐out events into being. While their explanations diverged from a Durkheimian schema, the results of their actions did not. In effect they serendipitously did cultural work to further the Durkheimian process without being consciously concerned by it as an explanation of motives.

This paper suggests that the Durkheimian model illuminates a point of connection between commerce and affect in the reception of star performances. Further research on live music using the model as a hypothesis may therefore be useful.

The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how people making music represent their production activities using images of consumption.

Supporting evidence is based on in-depth interviews with musicians and support personnel. The data are structured through a thematic analysis.

The paper argues that consumption serves as a discursive resource that allows cultural producers to make sense of production activities which do not conform to an image of production as an alienated form of labour.

Relating the analysis to the ongoing attempts to conceptualise cultural producers through the concept of prosumption, the paper concludes that there are limits to cultural producers’ abilities to represent their production activities as production rather than a structural change in social or economic organisation, as suggested by some consumer researchers.

The relationship between musicians and the music industry has often been depicted as a dichotomy between creativity and commerce with musicians conflicted between their roles as artists and their roles as marketers of sound. Recently, marketing researchers have problematized this dichotomy and suggested musicians perceive these roles as inevitable and indivisible. However, the processes of how musicians market their sound to the industry gatekeepers remain unclear. This study seeks to find the key industry gatekeepers for musicians and how musicians sell their personal sound to them.

Using an interpretative phenomenological approach, ten interviews with professional musicians across different music genres provided insight into the strategies musicians use to market their sound to industry gatekeepers.

In total, three key gatekeepers and the five strategies that musicians use to sell their sound are identified. The gatekeepers are record labels, other musicians and consumers. Musicians sell their sound to these gatekeepers through the externally directed strategies of using social media to build relationships, defining their personal sound through genre and creating a unique sound, and through the internally directed strategies of keeping motivated through sound evolution and counting on luck.

The findings are limited by the small number of musicians interviewed and the heterogeneous representation of music genres.

The study contributes to theoretical understandings of how musicians as cultural producers market their sound in a commercial industry.

This paper responds to a range of theory and industry reporting, to provide an informed narrative which explores the current state of accessibility at UK festivals for people who are Deaf or disabled and the potential implications of developments in ICT for enhancing design, marketing, operations and performances across all phases of festival delivery, in order to improve inclusivity and accessibility. To this end, the paper addresses the following question: What do representatives of the UK live music industry perceive as barriers to accessibility and exemplars of current best practice for music festival attendees who are Deaf or disabled? What do representatives of the UK live music industry consider as the role of ICT to increase accessibility for music festival attendees who are Deaf or disabled?

Primary research focused on supply-side considerations with a sample group of 10 UK live music industry professionals. The scope of the research was limited geographically to England and by artform to open-air music festivals, venues which host some music festival provision and a Sector Support Organisation. Open questions elucidated qualitative information around; awareness of accessibility and inclusivity initiatives; potential for co-creation; non-digital improvements; current technological influences; and potential digital futures for accessible “live” experiences. A conceptual framework was constructed and semi-structured face-to-face interviews were carried out with six respondents, and four respondents completed a structured, self-administered e-mail questionnaire.

Findings include: ICT can facilitate enhanced dialogue with existing and potential audience members who are Deaf or disabled to both; reduce existing social exclusion (Duffy et al., 2019) and improve the visitor experience for all attendees. All respondents agreed that physical enhancements are important and some mentioned communications and customer care. Respondents reported increasingly ambitious usages of ICT at music festivals, which may support suggestions of a virtual experience trend (Robertson et al., 2015). Online ticketing systems have potential to grant equal functionality to people who are Deaf or disabled, as recommended by the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (2015). Respondents broadly welcomed the potential for positive impacts of ICT on increasingly accessible live experiences at music festivals which retained a sense of authenticity and “liveness”. Challenges around “as live” ICT-derived experiences were identified including risks of creating second-class experiences for Deaf and disabled attendees.

The limitations of this case study include the small sample size and limited scope.

Promoters should: consider further developing the co-creation of accessibility initiatives, utilising ICT to both deliver improvements and engage with potential audience members who are Deaf or disabled. Seek to pro-actively recruit staff members who are Deaf or disabled and significantly increase their programming of performers who are Deaf or disabled. Consider reviewing their ticketing processes for music festivals, to identify accessibility challenges for audience members and implement appropriate ICT-based solutions. Consider maximising accessibility benefits for audience members who are Deaf or disabled from existing ICT provision on site and explore additional bespoke ICT solutions at music festivals.

Adopting the best practices described across the festival sector may improve inclusivity for disabled people at music festivals and other events. Event management educators should consider reviewing provision to ensure that best practice is embedded around accessibility for audience members who are Deaf or disabled. Additional public funding should be provided to drive ICT-derived improvements to accessibility for audience members who are Deaf or disabled at smaller-scale music festivals. Further research should be considered around inclusive approaches to digital experiences within a music festival environment for audience members who are Deaf or disabled and tensions between accessibility and notions of “liveness”.

The “snapshot” of digital aspects of accessibility at UK festivals within this research is of particular value due to paucity of other research in this area, and it's narrative from varied industry professionals. The paper makes recommendations to promoters, academics and public funders, to attempt to advance inclusion (or at least to mitigate current exclusion) and identify directions for future research into accessible digital experiences at music festivals for people who are Deaf or disabled.

This article seeks to understand how audience members at a live jazz event react to one another, to the listening venue, and to the performance. It considers the extent to which being an audience member is a social experience, as well as a personal and musical one, and investigates the distinctive qualities of listening to live jazz in a range of venues.

The research draws on evidence from nearly 800 jazz listeners, surveyed at the Edinburgh Jazz and Blues Festival and in The Spin jazz club, Oxford. Questionnaires, diaries and interviews were used to understand the experiences of listening for a wide range of audience members, and were analysed using NVivo.

The findings illustrate how listening to live jazz has a strongly social element, whereby listeners derive pleasure from attending with others or meeting like‐minded enthusiasts in the audience, and welcome opportunities for conversation and relaxation within venues that help to facilitate this. Within this social context, live listening is for some audience members an intense, sometimes draining experience; while for others it offers a source of relaxation and absorption, through the opportunity to focus on good playing and preferred repertoire. Live listening is therefore both an individual and a social act, with unpredictable risks and pleasures attached to both elements, and varying between listeners, venues and occasions.

There is potential for this research to be replicated in a wider range of jazz venues, and for these findings to be compared with audiences of other music genres, particularly pop and classical, where differences in expectations and behaviour will be evident.

The authors demonstrate how existing audience members are a vast source of knowledge about how a live jazz gig works, and how the appeal of such events could be nurtured amongst potential new audiences. They show the value of qualitative investigations of audience experience, and of the process of research and reflection in itself can be a source of audience development and engagement.

This paper makes a contribution to the literature on audience engagement, both through the substantial sample size and through the consideration of individual and social experiences of listening. It will have value to researchers in music psychology, arts marketing and related disciplines, as well as being a useful source of information and strategy for arts promoters.

This research aims to explore in detail aspects of the role and character of student unions as venues for live music in post‐war Britain. Guiding questions ask: what part have student unions, entertainment officers and the wider body of students – in their role as consumers – played in the economics of the live music business? What is specific to the business of live music in student unions? How is this sector of activity related to national and local scenes, promoters, non‐student audiences and the wider popular music culture and economy?

The research draws upon formal and informally archived sources to formulate definitions and scope for research, tracing the historical emergence and fortunes of popular music programming in universities.

The research traces a history of professionalization of music provision by students, a result of co‐ordination efforts by the National Union of Students. It outlines the specific character of live music business in student unions as determined by its subsidized nature.

Sources for research are unevenly preserved and the scope of activity – historical and contemporary is considerable. Further empirical research is required in order to fully explore this important, if neglected area of cultural and economic activity.

The role and character of student unions in the economy of the music industry is rarely considered and this paper offers set of concepts for further research and detailed historical insights into this sector of business.

This paper seeks to explore the design of popular music performance space, focusing particularly on recent developments that are changing the form and operation of permanent venues and travelling stages. Its objective is to analyse the typology of existing venues but also to chart the emergence of new and distinct building forms in response to changing artist, promoter and audience demands.

The paper investigates the factors that determine the architecture of live performance space, based on the research project's detailed examination of specific examples that range from small music clubs to large and complex stadium‐sized buildings. The paper introduces the research themes that have shaped the author's book Live Architecture: Popular Music Venues, Stages and Arenas, which will be published in 2011.

The paper proposes a new categorisation of buildings as; adopted, adapted and dedicated music performance environments, and explores the significance of mobile facilities as architecture in their own right, but also as a modifier of place and space. It identifies factors that are changing the scale and operation of performance venues and articulates the implications for new venues.

This paper presents a continuing research project that is examining for the first time popular music performance building design as a distinct architectural genre. It proposes for the first time a building typology in order to increase our understanding of how the most successful spaces have been created, and how future ones might safeguard live music's power and immediacy for its audiences.