What is it about?
Music fans increasingly want to connect directly with the artists they love. Live-streaming music platforms now let them do this in real time, chatting with performers, requesting songs, and sending virtual gifts during broadcasts. We wanted to understand what keeps fans coming back to these platforms and willing to recommend them to others. We studied JOOX Rooms, a popular live-streaming feature on the JOOX music app in Thailand, and surveyed 175 users. We focused on three kinds of connections, or "bonds," that platforms build with fans: financial bonds (discounts, rewards, and virtual currency), social bonds (chatting and personal attention from artists), and structural bonds (reliable, professional, well-organised service). We found that all three bonds make fans feel emotionally engaged with the platform, and this emotional engagement is what drives them to keep using JOOX Rooms and tell their friends about it. Most strikingly, fans' feelings toward the platform and toward the artists were almost impossible to tell apart, suggesting that for many fans the app and the artist have become part of the same experience.
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Photo by Elice Moore on Unsplash
Why is it important?
Streaming now generates the majority of the world's recorded music revenue, and live-streaming features that let fans interact with artists in real time are growing fast, especially across Southeast Asia. Yet we still know surprisingly little about what actually makes fans emotionally invested in these platforms. This study offers clear, evidence-based guidance. It shows that platforms cannot rely on financial rewards alone: discounts and virtual gifts work best when combined with genuine social interaction and dependable, professional service. Each type of bond does something different, and together they build the emotional attachment that keeps fans loyal. Our most notable finding is that fans often cannot separate their attachment to an artist from their attachment to the platform. This matters for artists, platform designers, and the wider music industry, because it suggests that emotional loyalty, and the difficulty of switching to a competitor, operates at the level of the whole platform experience, not just the music itself.
Perspectives
This project began with my co-author Nattawee, whose background in the music industry sparked a fascination with how live-streaming platforms are reshaping the relationship between artists and their fans. What started as a question about fan loyalty grew into something more conceptually interesting for me: the possibility that fans may no longer draw a clear line between the artists they love and the platforms that connect them. As someone whose work usually centres on health and cross-cultural communication, I found it refreshing to bring familiar tools to the world of digital entertainment and fan culture. The finding that emotional attachment to a platform can be statistically inseparable from attachment to an artist genuinely surprised me, and I think it raises important questions about how much quiet power platforms now hold over our cultural and emotional lives. I hope this article is useful not only to researchers in fan and platform studies, but also to the artists and creators trying to make sense of the digital spaces they increasingly depend on.
Dr. Smith Boonchutima
Chulalongkorn University
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Enhancing fans and artists’ affective engagement and behavioral intentions in digital music streaming platforms through relational bonds: a case study of JOOX Rooms, Cogent Arts and Humanities, May 2026, Taylor & Francis,
DOI: 10.1080/23311983.2026.2675861.
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