LAUSR

Purpose Academic studies have sought to understand the motivations of festival and event attendees usually through single-event case studies. This approach has failed to generate a generalizable set of motivation items. In addition, there is increasing criticism in the literature of the common methodological framework used in festival motivation studies, due to a perceived over-reliance on motivations derived from the broader tourism and travel research, with too little attention to event-specific factors. The purpose of this paper is to address these issues by analyzing a sub-category of motivation studies, music festivals, in order to see if this approach can elicit a consistent set of motivation dimensions for the sub-category, which can in turn be compared and contrasted with the broader literature. A new case study of motivations to attend the 28th Macau International Music Festival (MIMF) is included to complement the existing music festival sub-category by adding a classical music and music festivals in Asia. Design/methodology/approach Motivation dimensions important to music festivals are compared to dimensions across the broader festival motivation literature to find similarities and differences. Factor analysis is used to identify the motivation dimensions of attendees at the MIMF and the results are compared to those of existing music festival studies. Findings Music festival goers are shown to be primarily motivated by the core festival offering, the music, in contrast to festival attendees in general, where socialization has emerged as the primary motivating element. The results of the additional case study support these findings. Originality/value In contrast to previous research, this study examines the possibility of identifying common motivations among festival attendees through studying festivals by sub-categories.