The number of people watching culture and art events is increasing every year due to growing income and leisure following economic growth. The term culture holds a variety of meanings in academic and context aspects. Its narrow definition is an intell...
The number of people watching culture and art events is increasing every year due to growing income and leisure following economic growth. The term culture holds a variety of meanings in academic and context aspects. Its narrow definition is an intellectual, musical, artistic, or cultural outcome. In a broad sense, it encompasses the overall lifestyle of society or the values, practices, symbols, institutions, and interpersonal relationships of a society. As one of the ways to express life, culture and art offer the most remarkable channel to understand what a human being is. Human beings get sympathy, consolation, and get to participate in explicit and implicit communication with others through art. Such communication helps promote a broader and deeper understanding of society, which adds a social meaning to art.
The interest level and activity participation of EDM festivals, on which this study focuses, can be considered as accumulated cultural capital of different cultural capital types. Therefore, this study set out to investigate the effects of the effort to create cultural capital through an EDM festival on the quality of life via performance satisfaction and behavioral intention.
Today South Korea is called a republic of popular music festivals. A music festival is available to people everywhere in the nation throughout the four seasons. The time has come when people no longer need to wait for a certain festival as they can go out and enjoy one at will regardless of the season. As festivals are launched in various musical genres, festival content has become diverse as well, which has attracted a good number of people. Such a festival is not merely a venue for music, but a space beyond music, being utilized as a means of expression. It can help to increase people's satisfaction with life.
In this study, a survey was conducted with viewers that watched an EDM performance. Data was collected from viewers that experienced an EDM festival in the nation before the outbreak of COVID-19, which suspended most festivals in the nation. The survey took place for about four days from May 7~10, 2022. Considering the non-contact situations amid the COVID-19 pandemic, the researcher commissioned it to an online research specialist The address of the online research website:
http://kr.entrustsurvey.com/sampling-company-entrust-survey.html, Entrust Survey,
May 7, 2022.
so that it could be conducted online.
The survey results led to the following findings:
First, cultural knowledge and activities, except for cultural literacy, had significant effects on the satisfaction and behavioral intention of viewers. Cultural activities had greater effects than cultural knowledge, which demonstrates that those who usually take an active part in activities related to culture and art and engage in vigorous activities tend to have greater satisfaction and actively behave by watching the performance again and recommending it to others.
Secondly, satisfaction with EDM festivals had significant effects on the behavioral intention of viewers. This finding also supports many previous studies that demonstrated significant causal relations between consumer satisfaction and behavioral intention.
Finally, cultural activities and knowledge as cultural capital had impacts on behavioral intention partially via performance satisfaction. The behavioral intention of viewers had relatively greater impacts on their satisfaction than the direct impacts of cultural capital and cultural knowledge. Cultural literacy and knowledge under cultural capital via an EDM festival had significant effects on the quality of life of viewers. Satisfaction and behavioral intention in watching a performance had no direct significant effects on quality of life. That is, watching culture and art such as an EDM performance itself does not bring consumers happiness directly. Consumers can feel happy in their personal lives with just their cultural literacy, interest, and accumulated knowledge.
The findings of the study indicate that the expansion of information and opportunities for the public to accumulate cultural literacy will lead to their consumption such as watching a performance, and at the same time, their happiness.
The study was based on quantitative research, thus it did not conduct any in-depth research on the unique nature and inter-generational relations by gender and age in South Korean society, leaving room for improvement. If future studies on such popular performances as EDM festivals, whose research has been relatively insufficient as a qualitative topic, they will be able to provide more profound research outcomes.