The Local Community’s Social and Institutional Influence on The Development of Music Festivals in Denmark.

This research paper examines the effect the community, in which a music festival is located, has on the music festival’s construction and establishment. Previously academic literature has been focused on establishing the audience’s motivation for attending music festivals as well as establishing how music festivals influence the community. Research has not been conducted on how the community affect music festivals. The research has been conducted by executing eight expert interviews with representatives from three urban festivals and three rural festivals. The expert varies from volunteers to paid personnel within their respective music festivals. The research was conducted with a social constructivist philosophy as the evolvement and changes within culture happen in interactions between individuals. The method used for coding was the IAD framework as it gave a structure for analysing the interviews. The codes generated were split into three themes, 1. Volunteers 2. Collaborators, and 3. Urban/rural. The results showed that volunteers were one of the key representatives of the community attributes, hence the festivals’ different use of volunteers specifically influenced the construction of the festival. The rural festivals had volunteers in critical managerial positions, hence the volunteers’ opinions regarding the orchestration and decisions had to be considered. Furthermore, the festivals’ use of collaborators showed that rural festivals to a higher degree than urban used local collaborators as producers, which meant their opinions were a factor when developing the festival in the rural areas as well. The urban/rural theme showed that urban festivals primarily focus on the audience’s opinion towards the festival, which is reached through different interactions. This interaction and focus on audience satisfaction means that the urban festivals’ outcome primarily is influenced by the willingness to achieve legitimacy from the consumers. It also shows the complexity of using the terms urban and rural as the definition within music festivals is not binary but a spectrum. The research establishes based on the results three criteria which define how much influence the community has on the development and structure of music festivals, these criteria are: volunteers in critical managerial roles, paid personnel, and collaborators as producers. As the definition of rural and urban should be regarded as a spectrum these criteria can help further research establish if a festival is influenced by the community. The research results showed that the rural festivals are more influenced by the community than the urban due to the influence of volunteers in critical positions as well as using local businesses as producing collaborators. Aside from this, the rural festival’s differences occur due to personnel being paid, an aspect that could also be researched further in future research.