The digital world and digital technologies have put us into a new age of technological change where digital has changed the game, especially in the case of music and entertainment.
The current landscape of the music industry continues to experience growth with the advent of new technologies, with companies such as Spotify are providing unprecedented access to music to their current 108 million paying subscribers in quarter two of 2019. This means that consumers have access to a vast amount of music like never before, making the connection between artist and audience that much more important.
The popularized usage of digital media in storytelling has demonstrated a drastic impact on the success of music artists and their work, affecting relationships and environments between artists and audiences to become more dynamic. However, the effects and outcomes of media exposure are complex.
This led to the development of my research study titled Kinetic, "An Exploration of Storytelling Media and Content Experiences and the Impact on Fan Relationships".
Under the supervision of Dr.Louis Etienne Dubois at Ryerson University, we created a research study that focused on analyzing the relationship between media effects and mediums, asking the question, “Do digital storytelling experiences affect the relationship between artist and audience in the music industry?”.
Media consumption is complicated, as it can lead to various outcomes between media characters and audiences. The study analyses the audience’s experience in the dimensions of parasocial interaction, identification, affinity, similarity, and imitation.
Parasocial interaction is the sense of false friendship between media characters and media users, which is an illusionary relationship between spectator and performer. Identification is the mechanism that influences the audience to feel like they are on the inside of the story, and feel like the events are happening to them. Similarity refers to the judgment of objective and perceived similarity between character and viewer. Affinity is described as the liking or depending of something. Imitation is described as the desire to be like or behave like a character.
The objective of the study was to analyze the impact of digital storytelling media on various media outcomes between music artists and audiences. I wanted to see how different digital media influenced various media consumption outcomes.
The experimental study was designed to examine the influence of digital storytelling on various media consumption outcomes of the audience. Across four different conditions (i.e. media), as well as a fifth control condition. No prior experience with digital storytelling was required as this study did not focus on media expertise, but rather on anyone exposed to digital media. The experiment used virtual conferencing to administer the study, with a digital survey for participants to fill out at the end of the experiment.
