After the goldrush : willingness to pay for concert service and product attributes in South Africa

Abstract

After the gold rush that was the recorded music business in the twentieth century, the industry finds itself in a difficult time of severely reduced revenues from recorded works distributed on physical media. As the industry searches for a solution to its problems, this research investigates the potential additional revenues from live music events as an element of the revenue replacement engine. The core objective governing this research was to gain a clearer understanding of concert service and product attributes that are valued by customers and to gauge their willingness to pay for these attributes. Also key to the brief was the goal of understanding the consumer decision-making and buying process with reference to the rules applied in the buying process. The questionnaire used in this research was structured by design and sought to gauge from concert audiences what they were willing to pay for preferred product or service attributes.The findings show that there is a willingness to pay for some concert related product and service attributes and that there are distinct clusters within the respondent population that are distinctly different from each other across a variety of demographic and other metrics. Other than on a single sub-attribute, premium bar facilities, there was no evidence found for using ticket class as an indicator for willingness to pay for service or product attributes or subattributes. There was evidence found, however, that demographic and other metrics could be indicators for willingness to spend on each attribute and subattribute.