Creating authentic experience: Audience and scene marketing of live music performance in China

How does authenticity arise and affect people's sense of participation in live music performances? A large amount of authenticity research has been explored in the field of culture activity participation and tourism. While authenticity discourse has been extensively theorized within tourism studies and recent paradigms are placed in the discourse of postmodern society, music performance authenticity research remains constrained by analyses of musical textuality, ideological formations and technic means to improve listening. This thesis imports motivation-studies insight that pre-event motives predict on-site behaviour (Bansal snd Eiselt, 2004), but reframes the question through Lacan’s Three Orders to ask how pre-performance fantasies are authenticated or vetoed as the show unfolds. Drawing on Jacques Lacan’s Three Orders Theory, this thesis establishes a framework to show the significance, generation, dynamics and impact of authenticity on participants over three Chinese music scenes, develop a processual framework that illuminates the intersubjective co-creation of authenticity across three distinctive Chinese music scenes. Through multi-fields observation, focus groups and semi structured interviews, I articulate three findings: first, participants' authenticity perceptions manifest as psycho-social fantasies shaped by the dialectic between symbolic meaning of live music performance and imaginary self-projections. Second, authenticity operates as a dynamic identity verification mechanism, continuously negotiated through participants' evolving positionalities within the performance. Third, the thesis proposes "scene marketing" as an experiential business paradigm that strategically activates authenticity production through four operational dimensions: lifestyle extract, multimedia touchpoints, composite scenarios, and scenario retrospectives. Fourth, the thesis challenges the prevailing assumption that authenticity is only accessible to actively engaged participants or fans (Collins, 2004; Liebst, 2019; Kolar and Zabkar, 2010). It demonstrates that passive or casual audience members also achieve authentic experiences—albeit through alternative pathways such as sensory immersion, symbolic spectacle, and imaginative resonance. This finding calls for pay attention to different audience types in authenticity research and underscores the need to account for diverse participant identities and engagement levels in future. Theoretical contributions extend existing tourism authenticity debates into music performance consumption domains while critiquing research paradigm in authenticity research. The thesis develops the psychoanalytic approach to authenticity research. Practically, the scene marketing model provides music performance marketing with a sustainable concept for enhancing audience experience in China's rapidly commercializing music industry. This synthesis advances understanding of contemporary authenticity while demonstrating the operability of psychoanalytic theory in cultural marketing strategies.