A Quantitative Research on Relationship between Audience Experience and Their Expenditure in Chinese Music Event

Since experience has been the fourth competitive stage in the economy, its important role is manifested in every industry, especially for festivals and events. A good audience experience always relates to a positive economic impact on events. A good experience can attract an audience to re-participate and voluntarily spread positive word-of-mouth about events, and good commercial operation also helps event providers provide a good experience for the audience. However, the concept of experience is full of connotations and descriptions (Andersson & Armbrecht, 2014), it is subjective and without the fixed system. Therefore, it is necessary to research on the relationship between audience experience and their expenditure. Music event has developed quickly in China these years because of the increasing demand, the number of the audience attending to music events in 2016 exceeded 10 million. In this background, the audience in the Chinese music event is a group worthy of study. This study aims to find out the relationship between audience experience and their expenditure in music event in China. An audience is presented an event experience scale from the ATLAS project and eight categories expenditure to choose how much they spend in every category. There are 321 respondents participate in the study, and 145 respondents have been to the music event in last 12 months who are the primary respondents. Findings from bivariate correlation, chi-square test for independence and ANOVA test show that most of the audience think highly of Chinese music events and the relationship between audience total experience and their expenditure is insignificant, but some sub-relationships are significant. Audience transportation expenditure and other activities expenditure affect audience affective engagement significantly, and audience transportation expenditure and souvenirs expenditure affect audience physical engagement significantly. Implications of this are that event providers can influence audience emotional judgement and active participation by different pricing strategies and Chinese government should set up adequate monitoring and assessment systems to control the quality of experience that music event provides for the audience.