"I'm at #Osheaga!": Listening to the Backchannel of a Music Festival on Twitter

It has become common practice for audience members to use social media to connect, share, and communicate with each other during events (e.g., sport events, elections, award ceremonies). But how is this backchannel used during a musical event and what does it say about how people engage with the music and the artists performing it? In this paper, we present the result of a study of a dataset composed of 31,140 tweets posted during and around the 10 edition of Osheaga, an important music festival held annually in Montreal. A combination of statistics and qualitative content analysis is used to examine the postings. This allows us to describe the content of these postings (i.e., topics, shared media), the type of message being shared (i.e., opinion, expression, information), and who the authors of these tweets are.