Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience

Karen Burland, Stephanie Pitts, Karen Burland, Stephanie Pitts

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781409469810
• eBook ISBN: 9781317158974
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Media & Performing Arts
• Subtopic: Music

Coughing and Clapping: Investigating Audience Experience explores the processes and experiences of attending live music events from the initial decision to attend through to audience responses and memories of a performance after it has happened. The book brings together international researchers who consider the experience of being an audience member from a range of theoretical and empirical perspectives. Whether enjoying a drink at a jazz gig, tweeting at a pop concert or suppressing a cough at a classical recital, audience experience is affected by motivation, performance quality, social atmosphere and group and personal identity. Drawing on the implications of these experiences and attitudes, the authors consider the question of what makes an audience, and argue convincingly for the practical and academic value of that question.

Chapter 1
Prelude

Stephanie Pitts and Karen Burland

When Christopher Small invented the useful word ‘musicking’ to describe the many forms of taking part in music, he did so through a rhetorical deconstruction of the classical symphony hall and its ritualized performance events, in which he perceived there to be ‘a dissonance between the meanings – the relationships – that are generated by the works that are being performed and those that are generated by the performance events’ (Small, 1998: 14). His evidence was gathered as an ethnomusicologist, applying the techniques of close observation and rich description to a musical setting close to home, in ways that have since become more widespread within that discipline. For music psychologists, however, Small’s account of the concert hall raised more questions than it answered, and perhaps contributed to the growth in empirical investigations of listener experience that have flourished in the last decade or so, many of whose authors are represented or referenced in this book.

In Coughing and Clapping, we take Small’s framework of exploring the many facets of concert attendance – the venue, the decisions and rituals of ticket purchasing, the interaction with other audience members, the expectations of listener behaviour, and the music ‘itself’, encompassing repertoire and performance – and examine fresh evidence for how these elements are experienced and understood by concert-goers. Rather than focusing exclusively on classical music, as Small did on that occasion, our authors examine a range of classical, jazz and popular music audiences, whose varied experiences help to illuminate what is distinctive about listening in different genres, and also what is similar about the pleasures and purposes of live music listening. Some of the case studies reported here (see chapters by Radbourne et al., and Stevens et al.) venture into other art forms, particularly contemporary dance, raising questions about whether the experience of live arts consumption is different across genres. Many of the chapters show how live listening is made distinctive by its listeners, as each person’s connection with the event is shaped by expectations, prior experiences, mood and concentration. This variety of experience suggests that while Small’s rhetoric about the concert hall remains a useful polemic against which empirical evidence can be compared, the need for an updated view of the purposes and practices of the concert hall and other musical venues is long overdue.

The decision to call this collection Coughing and Clapping arose during one of the many coffee and biscuit sessions that have gone into the making of this book. The suggestion was at first light-hearted, but as our prospective authors and commissioning editors responded positively to the idea, we came to appreciate the way that the title puts the audience at the heart of the live music experience. However extensive the preparation that goes into a musical event – from fire extinguishers (Kronenburg) to repertoire (Burland and Windsor), and from marketing (O’Reilly et al.) to tweeting (Bennett) – it is the audience, through the quantity of their attendance and the quality of their response, who make each performance distinctive. A long-time collaborator of ours on audience research, Chris Spencer, drew our attention to a report on BBC Radio 4’s Today news programme (29 January 2013), in which pianist Susan Tomes and economist Andreas Wagener were discussing recently published statistics to suggest that people cough twice as much during performances than they do in everyday life. Contemporary music and quiet, slow movements were most likely to attract such a response, and coughing in the concert hall followed predictable patterns, one person’s coughs setting off a wave of similar events (Wagener, 2012). While Tomes observed that the concert hall cough also seemed more vigorous and unrestrained than its real life counterpart, and was therefore ‘really quite distracting and startling to performers’, Wagener suspected a deliberate motivation to be heard in the concert hall: coughing has an ambiguity such that ‘you cannot really distinguish whether it is a deliberate thing that happens, a sort of comment that you wish to make on the music, or whether it’s something that is just a reflex because you have an itching throat […] and this ambiguity makes a cough a rather attractive way to comment on the music, to participate in the performance, to show your existence in the concert and to break this concert etiquette’.

Wagener may be right in his supposition that audience members want to find a voice in the concert hall, and several of the chapters in this collection show how new technology is enabling them to do exactly that, by tweeting and texting during performances (Bennett), and through blogging (Long), archiving and mapping (Cohen) after the event. Audiences themselves are becoming increasingly public commentators on live music, through online fan forums, Twitter feeds and other evolving technology. A response to a concert can now go far beyond conventional, polite applause – coughing and clapping are only the start of the audience’s expression of their appreciation (or otherwise). Their experience is therefore more available to researchers, acting as a resource to both inform research and to measure against data collected in other, more researcher-directed ways. In compiling some of the more technology-focused chapters in the book, we have been aware of the danger that these will date quickly, so that what sounds like cutting-edge practice now will no doubt be superseded in a few years’ time. Similar challenges have been seen in the research on listening to recorded music, where Walkmans have been replaced by iPods, and CDs by downloads, almost more quickly than commentators can publish their response (cf. Bull, 2000; 2005). Nonetheless, these chapters have lasting messages about the urge to document and react to a temporal arts experience: in the same way that researchers grapple with ways of understanding the fleeting nature of live listening, audiences too are seeking to secure their musical memories, to make them part of their musical narrative and identity.

Our authors come from a wide range of disciplinary backgrounds, including music, architecture, psychology, cultural studies, media, arts marketing and management. Within each of those disciplines, research on the qualitative experience of live arts engagement is relatively new, and brings with it a search for effective methods that capture the immediacy and individuality of audience experience. Some of these are audience-led, such as the tweeting and blogging of Tori Amos fans in Lucy Bennett’s chapter, and the fan forums used by Robert Kronenburg and Paul Long: here the audience members provide the research ‘data’ unsolicited, and the researchers interpret this naturalistic evidence to gain a sense of what audience experience means, within and after the musical event. Other evidence is more directly prompted by the researchers, through discussions between audiences and performers (Burland and Windsor; Dobson and Sloboda), and widespread use of interviews, questionnaires and focus groups (Pitts; Karlsen; O’Reilly et al.), with Sara Cohen’s invitation to make ‘maps’ of musical memories showing how visual prompts can enrich these verbal responses. Some authors tackle the challenging question of how to capture a time-specific experience by using ‘in the moment’ response tools with their audiences (Stevens et al.), measuring emotion and arousal during the course of a performance and so advancing understanding of what people are doing when they listen. Taken together, these chapters show the state of audience research to be still a relatively exploratory one, but one which is gathering pace and providing new insight on the contribution of live music to individual and social experience.

We have divided the book into three sections, and will introduce the later sections in more detail as they begin. Drawing on the diverse range of disciplines and methods represented by our authors, we have aimed to provide a closer empirical examination of Small’s (1998) portrayal of the concert hall, broadened here to include a range of venues and genres. In the first section, ‘Before the event’, the focus is on preparing for and anticipating the live music experience, and perspectives include those of the marketing and branding experts who make decisions about how to portray music to its potential audiences (O’Reilly et al.), the audiences who interpret those marketing materials and weigh them up against their own musical and social preferences and priorities (Pitts), and the architects and venue managers who prepare the spaces in which live music is heard (Kronenburg). Despite the focus on anticipation, the cycle of audience engagement quickly becomes clear: decisions about attendance are informed by previous experiences, and marketing and venue design are shaped by past as well as future audiences. In the third section of the book, this loop is closed and the cycle continued with a focus on capturing the ephemeral experiences of live arts attendance, through mapping (Cohen), recording (Long) and discussing events (Dobson and Sloboda). These are all processes of audience engagement that help to articulate the experience of live listening in ways that, as well as being informative for researchers and concert promoters, provide the audiences with ways of assimilating a musical life narrative from the fragmented and transitory nature of being an audience member. Between these two stages in the continuous process of audience engagement, the second section of the book considers all that goes on in the event itself: the acts of evaluating and responding to an event (Radbourne et al.; Stevens et al.), the decisions or invitations to make these evaluations public (for audiences in Bennett’s chapter, and for performers in Burland and Windsor), and the sense of belonging and identity that can result from being part of an audience (Karlsen). The book as a whole shows the multiple meanings of live listening amongst varied audiences, and we reflect in a final chapter (Burland and Pitts) on what it means to be an audience member – and why that matters, for researchers, performers and promoters, and future listeners.

SECTION 1
Before the Event: Preparing and Anticipating

Chapter 2
Marketing Live Music

Daragh O’Reilly, Gretchen Larsen and Krzysztof Kubacki

In this chapter, we review issues relating to the marketing of live music and suggest a way of thinking about it which emphasizes the contributory role of audiences/fans/consumers, as well as live music’s symbolic or cultural aspects. The marketing of live music is an intensely practical exercise for the promoter. However, rather than providing an event management, project management or other mainly operational perspective, we go back to the ‘official’ definition of marketing and seek to move beyond current ‘mainstream’ notions. This is not to downplay the importance of operational issues, such as health and safety or licensing laws. It is more a case that this edited collection affords an opportunity for rethinking tired ideas which do not relate well to the realities of live music markets. There is no guaranteed formula for live music marketing. If one asks the question, ‘How should live music be marketed?’, the only sensible answer is: ‘It depends’. Live music marketing occurs in so many different contexts and forms and on so many widely differing scales and occasions that it would be unwise to impose a universal law-like view. In any case, the real question that matters from a marketing practitioner’s point of view is ‘How can live music be marketed successfully?’ There are many musical concerts and festivals which have lost money for their promoters, and there are plenty of musical venues, once famous and thriving, which are no longer in operation. Apart from getting the operational details right, we believe that a consideration of some of the wider, strategic issues can be very helpful in successful live music promotion.

The chapter begins with a review of the ‘official’ definition of marketing. As we aim to show, a discussion of live music marketing may benefit from adjusting the institutional definition of marketing. To that end, we offer a simple definition which lends greater weight to the role of music consumers, and to the processual and symbolic aspects of this important commercial and cultural phenomenon.

Problematising ‘Marketing’

Classic marketing objectives are to recruit and retain customers, with retention of existing customers usually being regarded as cheaper than recruiting new ones (Kotler et al., 2013, p. 19). This sits well enough with the idea, more widely used in the arts, including music, of audience development. The need to recruit and retain means that live music promoters must have strong competences in originating and sustaining relationships beyond a single transaction. This is about building a dynamic connection with customers over a longer period. For example, a pub venue may need to develop strong local relationships based on weekly events, whereas a festival organization will want people to return in the following years.

Another key aspect of marketing is the exchange relationship between a provider and a purchaser, a seller and buyer, a marketer and a consumer. Within live music, this translates into the commercial relationship between a performer and their audience. All of this is readily understandable, but if one returns to basic definitions of marketing, it can quickly be seen that there are problems in applying it to music.

The American Marketing Association (AMA)’s definition of marketing is as follows: ‘Marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large’ (AMA, 2007 [online]). There are a number of points worth teasing out in this definition. Firstly, the players or stakeholders it mentions include customers, clients, partners and society at large. This is very odd indeed, in so far as it completely fails to mention shareholders and executives as beneficiaries of the value which arises from market exchanges. Within the capitalist system – and certain parts of the music industries can be read as a very pure (or should that be impure?) form of capitalism – it is the owner of capital who is the key player, and marketing is usually seen as a highly important part of his/her behaviour. So, why this omission? Secondly, the AMA definition positions customers, clients, partners and society at large as people for whom something is done, and value is provided, as if marketing were an altruistic act, and profit were irrelevant. This is a significant – and perhaps ideologically convenient – elision of music commerce. The law of market investment says that capital will have its return, and marketing claims the intellectual authority for the best means of securing it. These points apply to music marketing as well as to other offerings. Thirdly, the AMA definition, with its emphasis on consumers as people for whom something is done, reduces them to being always only consumers and never also active participants. The danger in this formulation is that it ignores consumer agency. This is a fundamental issue. In the past, it has been taken for granted by marketers, and by many marketing scholars, that marketing is something done by marketers, and marketers only. This view privileges the agency of the seller. Yet a sales transaction requires a buying transaction. The two are mutually constitutive, two sides of the same coin. They have a financial effect on both parties to the deal. A market is made by the junction of offerors and purchasers. Therefore, arguably, marketing, in the sense of market-making, is better read as an activity or process carried out by both parties to a deal, one party behaving as a seller and the other as a buyer in that particular moment, each with their own set of associated practices. This view of marketing, which is, admittedly, not widely shared, has at least the merit of acknowledging the important role which the buyer or consumer plays. It seems very odd indeed that marketing, with its long-standing emphasis on the sovereignty of the consumer, client or customer, should not acknowledge in its primary institutional definition the co-agency of both the buyer and the seller.

Finally, an important strand of thinking in consumption studies – nowhere referenced in the AMA definition – is that consumers no longer consume products simply for their functional value, but also for their symbolic value, for what they mean to themselves and to others: ‘Central to postmodern theories of consumption is the proposition that consumers no longer consume products for their material utilities but consume the symbolic meaning of those products as portrayed in their images; products in fact become commodity signs’ (Elliott, 1997). There is a long-standing argument that consumers use brands as resources to construct identities (see Elliott and Wattanasuwan, 1998). This view sees social subjects as active agents who play a crucial role in creating their own identities through consumption. This idea of meaning-making consumer projects, in which identity is a key focus of attention, has particular relevance to the symbolic consumption of music (Larsen et al., 2010; Larsen, 2014). Music can be read as a multisensory experiential resource for the construction of identity. We can conceive of consumption as a process of meaning-making, and the notion of ‘active’ or ‘creative’ consumption recognizes that consumers are reflexive about their consumption activities, actively interpreting or judging, appropriating or resisting the texts offered for consumption. The meaning of the music is not only ‘in’ the music itself as coded, performed and decoded aurally, but in the consumers’ acts of engagement with it, the accounts which they give of it and the cultural categories which they use to talk about it.

Another aspect of agency which is obscured by the conventions of financial management discourse is the question of who is the investor in the music business. In the case of an international organization like Live Nation (www.livenation.co.uk), the answer might seem straightforward, according to current conventions at least. Certain people invest in Live Nation as shareholders, and Live Nation invests in the promotion of live music. Audiences who attend concerts and festivals, however, are not usually seen as investors in the same way. The money from ticket and subscription sales is posted to the revenue account and seen as forming the stream of money which contributes to the return on investment. Yet from the point of view of a fan or audience member, arguably they are also investing in the artists who are playing live music. Their money is the same unit of account and is just as necessary to the economic sustainability of the musician as that of the marketer, as well as the person or company who is normally regarded as the investor – in this case the promoter or record label.

If the above AMA definition were applied directly and unreflexively to live music, it would read as follows: ‘[Live music] marketing is the activity, set of institutions, and processes for creating, communicating, delivering, and exchanging offerings that have value for customers, clients, partners, and society at large’. If this definition were adopted, there would be no acknowledgement here of, for example, the festival organizer, the impresario, or the chamber music promoter, or anyone else who might be involved in marketing of live music, even … musicians. This would clearly be a fatal weakness in the definition. Nor does it offer any role for music consumers in the making of live music markets. Live music consumers also help to construct the market by providing money through their ticket purchases or subscriptions. Audiences, through their engagement, participation and quality of attention, help to add or co-create value in the concert or festival experience.

We argue, therefore, for a view of live music marketing that remedies the flaws in the AMA definition of marketing by acknowledging the role of the marketer, the interest in profit, the agency of both producers and consumers and the meaning-making processes by which live music brands are made.

What is Live Music?

Live music is a multisensory, immersive, aesthetic, musical and social experience. The theorization of the consumption of live arts performance, in particular, is very underdeveloped within marketing and consumption studies (Minor et al. 2004), although a considerable amount of work has of course been done on consumer experiences and experiential marketing (e.g. Holbrook and Hirschman, 1982; Kozinets, 2002). An interesting and helpful paper by Joy and Sherry (2003, p. 280) on multisensory embodied arts consumption experiences, is, the authors argue, ‘a corrective to the producer’s perspective of consumption that dominates the discourse of experience’. Live music is a unique form of musical experience spontaneously co-created by musicians and their audience. These experiences are produced through the interaction between musicians, audiences and the environment, and the experience itself cannot be separated from the music. The live music experience is ephemeral, and variable in terms of quality. Two concerts from the same artist can never be quite identical. Live music experiences are also perishable, once produced and consumed.

The words ‘live music’ can refer to a very wide range of experiences, for example, a long-standing music festival like Glastonbury or Bayreuth, a group of amateur musicians playing at a wedding, an organist playing at a funeral, an orchestra playing in a prestigious national venue, a rock band playing a gig on a worldwide tour, a brass band playing at a seaside resort, a choral concert, or a recital by a celebrated musician. It follows that those who are involved in putting on or promoting live music may include, for example, a local pub landlord, a student union entertainments officer, a large international organization like Live Nation, a successful festival organizer like Michael Eavis, the organizers of public concerts for municipal or national venues, a Broadway impresario, a rural ballroom operator, a rave organizer, radio DJs, tour managers, ticketing operations, music video directors, P.T. Barnum selling Jenny Lind (Waksman, 2011), musical artists themselves, record labels, artist managers, booking agents, and of course fans who spread word of mouth online and offline about forthcoming events. Live music brings together musicians and music consumers, and often...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Half Title page
• Series page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Figures
• List of Tables
• Notes on Contributors
• Series Editors’ Preface
• Acknowledgements
• Chapter 1 Prelude
• Section 1 Before the Event: Preparing and Anticipating
• Section 2 During the Event Listening and Connecting
• References
• Index