I pubblici del jazz e della musica classica: evidenze di due festival italiani

Many authors from several domains have explored music festivals. Strictly economic issues have been the main focus for years, while more recently attention is being given to the audience and particularly to the motivations pushing people to attend concerts: indeed, it is commonly agreed that being aware of the socio-demographic characteristics of festival visitors and of the needs that they try to fulfil through attendance is effectively helpful for the organizers, as it enables them to design suitable and almost personalized offers, which can attract large amounts of people. Yet, researchers’ interest goes far beyond: besides the assessment of the economic impacts upon the local areas and of the effects upon tourism, several studies have also investigated sociological and psychological implications, involving both the attendees and the inhabitants of the cities in which these events take place. A further way of getting to know festival audiences is by means of segmentation techniques, which are used with the purpose to identify and underline differences among internally homogeneous groups of attendees, in terms of motivations, preferences, consumption behaviour and demographic characteristics. The present study, lying within the complex domain of economics of culture, after outlining some of the contributions dealing with the analysis of several different aspects about music festivals visitors, aims at adding evidence to the existing literature about jazz and classical music festivals audiences while addressing some gaps as well. Most authors provide data from extra-EU countries and only a few are from the Old Continent; moreover, although this kind of research may provide quite interesting findings and open up paths for discussion, none of them have ever investigated attendees’ cultural consumption in their daily life extensively, as stated in Lee (2017), Kim and Tucker (2016). To face these lacks, the main results of two Italian surveys carried out in Turin in 2021 are presented: the features of the audiences of Torino Jazz Festival and MITO SettembreMusica, a jazz and a classical music festival respectively, are outlined and compared with the corresponding consumers’ profiles emerging from the literature, including demographic characteristics, motivations for attendance and social or psychological effects. A focus on the attendees’ consumption frequencies related to a specific bundle of cultural activities follows: an econometric analysis carried out through the software Stata permits to highlight and quantify similarities and differences among the samples, running regressions controlling for cultural consumptions, socio-demographic and behavioural features. This method represents a novelty within this field and, thanks to it, not only TJF attendees are contrasted to MITO ones for what concerns their participation into a bundle of cultural activities, considering some of the relevant factors influencing it, but comparisons of the characteristics of the attendees who consume only one musical genre, i.e. “the univores”, with those of the attendees who consume both jazz and classical music, i.e. “the omnivores”, are also possible: some interesting results emerge, encouraging further research concerning the characteristics of cultural consumption in the daily lives of different musical consumers.