Facebook as a platform for co-creating music festival experiences: The case of New Zealand’s Rhythm and Vines New Year’s Eve festival

The purpose of this paper is to address the need to understand how younger music festival-goers use and engage with a music festival’s Facebook page, and how they perceive this social networking service (SNS) as a potential on-line platform for value co-creation.

Face-to-face in-depth interviews were conducted with 16 young adults who attended an annual New Year’s Eve music festival, Rhythm and Vines, in Gisborne, New Zealand.

Analysis of the interview data revealed that the majority of participants did not actively engage with this platform and could be categorised as passive viewers or information-seekers. In addition, participants perceived five types of value from using this SNS: functional, social, emotional, interactive and aesthetic value. Even though participants were not segmented due to the small sample size, patterns in their levels of engagement with Facebook, attendance status, reasons for attending the festival and the combinations of forms of value that they perceived were identified.

Future research should use a large-scale survey method to obtain a representative sample that is generalisable to a specific population of music festival-goers.

Dominance of features on Facebook providing festival-goers with functional value suggests they prefer a passive or co-optation approach to value co-creation in this context. Due to the limited extent of participants actively co-creating value on this platform, alternative means of encouraging interaction to co-create value with festival-goers should be investigated.

This study demonstrates that this SNS provides this group of young adults with a means to connect their real-time festival experience, with their on-line Facebook social network during the year.