Artists and Attributions: How Music Platform Implementation Affects Parasocial Experiences and Support Intentions

ABSTRACT

We expand the experience of mediated relationships to include not only audience members’ perceptions of cognitive and emotional investments toward media figures, but also investment they believe these figures orient toward them in return (i.e., parasocial perception). This concept demonstrates how consumers experience a parasocial relationship more closely in line with interpersonal relationships. Expectations are examined in the context of artist-audience relationships and the communicative decisions made by media figures. The decisions artists make about the distribution of their music can affect audience attributions about how bands feel toward them and subsequent intentions to support these figures.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Supplementary Material

Supplemental data for this article can be accessed online at https://doi.org/10.1080/08838151.2022.2086550

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eric C. Wiemer

Eric C. Wiemer (Ph.D., Purdue University) is a Post-Doctoral Research Associate in the Department of Political Science at Purdue University. His research is concerned with issues related to online communication, media effects, and the relationship between political elites, the news media, and the public.

Julius Matthew Riles

Julius Matthew Riles (Ph.D., University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) is an Assistant Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Missouri. His research interests consist of exploring the interplay between media use and social relationships, including examining parasocial relationships, social perception outcomes of media use, and models for social behavior in the media landscape.

David Tewksbury

David Tewksbury (Ph.D., University of Michigan) is a Professor in the Department of Communication at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research interests include the political effects of new communication technologies, the cognitive processing of media messages, and audience news consumption behaviors.