Did Lockdowns Stimulate Digital Cultural Participation? Mapping the Post-pandemic Berlin Classical Concert Audience and Its Adoption of Audiovisual Concert Streams

The chapter provides representative figures gathered by an online survey about the socio-demographic structure, concert attendance, and media habits of the post-pandemic classical concert audience in the German capital. Specifically, it determines typical media usage patterns employed for listening to classical music in the every day, with the surprising finding that a third of the audience rarely ever listens to classical music in such contexts. It then focuses on explaining individual affinities to using audiovisual concert streams, a new media offer in the classical sector that became very famous as a substitute for personal concert visits during the pandemic. Findings demonstrate that while audiovisual concert streams used to be a niche offering for music professionals and tech-savvy male classic enthusiasts before 2020, the pandemic not only helped in increasing overall use frequencies but also stimulated usage in new segments of the classical concert audience (especially “digital natives”, women and higher-educated), thereby reducing priorly existing inequalities in digital cultural participation. Furthermore, results also show that any fears of concert streams becoming a substitute for traditional concert visits seem unwarranted: The more frequently people attend concerts in person, the more frequently they also tend to use concert streams and vice versa.