Affordances and Experiential Dimensions of Digital Concerts: Closer the Eye, Farther the Crowd

Live-streamed and recorded concerts have increased the possibilities for attending live performances. In this study, our goal was to gain a deeper understanding of the qualities of the aesthetic experience in digital concerts of Western classical music. We thematically analyzed the free-form comments left by 341 participants of an online experiment after they viewed a digital concert. With an inductive approach, we developed a thematic framework focusing on medium-related affordances and their influence on the participants’ experiences. The camerawork has a particular potential to affect sensory perception; for example, through close-ups and offering different visual perspectives. Additionally, the peculiarity of viewing the concert from one’s living room creates a situation that can both foster and inhibit aspects of the experience and produce a constrained kind of social connectedness. Hence, specific experiential dimensions—such as closeness and immersion—are developed by the digital medium in distinctive ways. At the same time, participants’ previous live experiences induced expectations conditioning the whole experience. Overall, this study contributes to understanding how an audience’s aesthetic experience acquires specific qualities through the digitization of the concert. The findings also indicate possibilities for triggering specific dimensions of the audience’s experience in future digital or hybrid concert design.