Livestreaming as a medium to satisfy fans A quantitative study on motivations to watch and willingness to pay livestreams of live music.

Due to the Covid-19 pandemic people had to stay at home and could not attend real-life concerts. During the lockdowns numerous livestreams of live music appeared everywhere, from small at home concerts to livestreams from big concert venues. Additionally, some livestreams were free to watch, however, others were paid only. The emergence of livestreams is not unexpected, as livestreams in the field of sports and theatre is already common. The livestreams of live attracted many viewers and quickly became the standard way to enjoy live music. The enormous popularity of livestreams makes it interesting to examine what motivates people to watch the livestreams, and even more interesting, why they pay for it. Therefore, the motivations to watch livestreams have been studied in this research. This has been done by first investigating the motivations to attend concerts in the literature and applying them to the livestream setting. Because the income of live music plays an important role in the music industry, is it relevant to investigate whether livestreams could fulfill a part of this role as well. Therefore, in this study it has been investigated when respondents are willing to pay for a livestream of live music. Because previous research on motivations for concert attendance has shown that being motivated plays an important role in attendance and willingness to pay. Moreover, because concerts cannot be attended during the Covid-19 pandemic is it also interesting to take the downsides of concerts as a possible predictor of willingness to pay for livestreams into account. Additionally, previous research has shown that fans are more willing to pay for a product of service of their interest, therefore fanship has been taken into account as well. Data was collected by a survey, after thoroughly discussing relevant literature in the field of motivations for concert attendance, downsides of concerts, willingness to pay and fanship. The survey has been filled in by 189 respondents with different ages, genders, education levels and nationalities. After conducting several statistical analyses, it has been proven that the degree of motivations to watch a livestream and the degree of fanship are the biggest predictors of willingness to pay for a livestream. Furthermore, behaviour from the past, such as watching and paying for livestreams predicts whether someone is more willing to pay for a livestream. The findings are partly in accordance with literature about motivations and willingness to pay for real-life concerts, as previous research showed that fans are more willing to pay. The findings of this research show that livestreams of live music are, especially for fans, a great addition to real-life concerts, could ensure profits and should therefore continue, even after the Covid-19 pandemic has come to an end.