Purpose: This study aims to explore how emotionally rich collective experiences create lasting, shareable memories, which influence future behaviours. In particular, the role of others and of music in creating value through memories is considered using the concept of socially extended emotions. Design/methodology/approach: Over 250 narratives were gathered from festival attendees in the UK and Finland. Respondents completed a writing task detailing their most vivid memories, what made them memorable, their feelings at the time and as they remembered them, and how they shared them. The narratives were then analysed thematically. Findings: Collective emotion continues to be co-created long after the experience through memory-sharing. The music listened to is woven through this extension of the experience but is, surprisingly, not a critical part of it. The sociality of the experience is remembered most and was key to the memories shared afterwards. The added value of gathering memorable moments, and being able to share them with others, is clearly evidenced. Practical implications: The study highlights the importance of designing events to create collective emotional moments that form lasting memories. This emphasizes the role of post-experience marketing and customer relationship building to enhance the value that is created customer-to-customer via memory sharing. Originality/value: The research addresses the lack of literature exploring post-event experience journeys and the collective nature of these. It also deepens a theoretical understanding of the role of time and sociality in the co-creation and extension of emotions and their value in hospitality consumption. A model is proposed to guide future research.

Although there is much discussion of what makes travel experiences memorable there is less on how remembering those experiences together then makes us feel and act. This empirical paper builds upon recent conceptual work in shared emotional memory, and explores the processes through which memories are negotiated and how these then affect our attitudes and behavioral intentions. Using an innovative qualitative methodology, we analyze individual and shared memories from six pairs of festival tourists. The findings highlight how wellbeing increases, through a shared reality and sense of belonging, as we negotiate an agreed memory of a past experience. The agreed memory is formed through negotiation, attunement, and emotional synchrony. This desire to agree and the wellbeing benefits that accrue strongly influence attitudes, behavioral intentions, and word-of-mouth. There are important implications for tourism practitioners in the design of experiences and in post-trip marketing activities informed by and influencing consumer memory sharing.

Purpose: – The purpose of this paper is to unfold factors anchored in visitors’ experiences possibly determinant of the success or failure of cultural festivals.Design/methodology/approach: – The studied data included 931 experience descriptions, 23 interviews and 51 empathy-based stories collected from 17 cultural festivals around Finland during the summers of 2012 and 2013. The nature of the study was exploratory, the theoretical framework was social constructionism, and the analysis was done using Foucauldian discourse analysis. The Method of Empathy Based Stories, a non-active role-playing technique, was used in the data collection.Findings: – The identified success factors were the programme, good quality food, sense of community, chill-out opportunities and building blocks of one’s identity. The factors that might cause failures were commercialised and low-quality programme, the low quality of services, commercialism demonstrated by elevated ticket and service pricing, VIP services confronting egalitarianism, crowd control and queueing and anti-social behaviour.Practical implications: – Three areas of particular interest were: how to nurture identity construction and personal well-being, how to enhance egalitarianism within the festival community, and how to promote the desired code of conduct without applying unnecessary rules and restrictions. If successful in these, the festival could boast of features that are not easy to replicate and that could create a competitive edge.Originality/value: – Empathy-based stories combined with discourse analysis contributed new insights on the issues of the success and failure of festivals. The empathy-based stories were particularly useful in retrieving informants’ perceptions of the future and for identifying factors that might cause failures.

Festivals have seen a surge in both size and numbers leading to a more business-oriented festival management. Thus, knowledge regarding the audiences and consumption of festivals deserve more attention, and monetary properties such as ticket sales and partnerships have become focal points in festival management. All these aims can be achieved by market segmentation. Festival Barometer is a longitudinal survey focused on the audiences of the largest Finnish rhythm music festivals. Using 7797 answers from the years 2014 and 2016, the audience was segmented using personal music preferences into groups named: hedonistic dance crowd, loyal heavy tribe and highly-educated omnivores. The members of the loyal heavy tribe are the most confident about their future participation in festivals. The hedonistic dance crowd love to have fun, and highly-educated omnivores see festivals’ values important for them. However, music preferences might not necessarily indicate the respondent’s actual taste but rather the referential group that best reflects the festivalgoer’s own identity. Additionally, the meaning of the music is highest in the youngest age group and it will be replaced with other priorities as the person gets older. This indicates that the music festival organisers are forced to attract constantly a new younger audience.

This study focuses on social sustainability of music events in adolescents’ lives through their perceptions and own words as they describe their live music experiences. Scrutinizing music event attendance from the social sustainability perspective demonstrates that the cultural content per se is not as meaningful as the social network that comes together in such events. The research questions were: How is social sustainability manifested in adolescents’ music event attendance, and what are the implications? The research data comprised the results of a web survey directed at 15–18 year old adolescents. Bonding and bridging, as well as the sense of community, were present in adolescents’ descriptions of live music experiences, producing various forms of well-being effects. The sense of belonging was almost missing from the narratives, which suggests that how adolescents consume music has a decaying interest in the grassroots culture that fosters the sense of belonging. This has major implications for the development of popular culture.

As festivals were cancelled or people were afraid of participating in mass gatherings during the COVID-19 pandemic, the well-being effects of festival participation were missed. How can these missed hedonic, eudaimonic or social well-being impacts be described, and how has the prolonged absence of live music events and the cancellation of the festival summer influenced attitudes towards festivals? Research data comprised nearly 13,000 responses to the Finnish Festival Barometer 2020 at a time when all the large festivals had been cancelled. Clustering the COVID-19 related questions led to three segments named Covid-cautious, Music-driven and Experience-oriented. The findings indicate challenges for event organisers, particularly in terms of communality. The theoretical contribution of this study is in scrutinising the well-being effects of festival attendance at a time when festivals were banned. Thus, survey participants could say the factors they missed most, revealing the most important well-being dimensions for their festival attendance.