Research summary
Fans could not separate loving the artist from loving the platform — and that is the finding, not a flaw in the instrument
Summarising the article
Enhancing fans and artists’ affective engagement and behavioral intentions in digital music streaming platforms through relational bonds: a case study of JOOX Rooms
Assoc. Prof. Dr. Smith Boonchutima · Cogent Arts & Humanities · 2026
The question
What makes listeners attach to a music streaming service that lets them talk to artists live, and does that attachment actually lead to continued use and recommendation?
How it was done
An online survey of JOOX Rooms users in Thailand, collected in April and May 2024. 306 people began the survey and 175 remained after data cleaning; distribution was by snowball sampling. The data was analysed with structural equation modelling, separating three relational bonds: financial (discounts, in-app coins, game rewards), social (live chat, artist responsiveness, personalised greetings) and structural (professional responses, reliable service, curated information).
What it found
- All three bonds increased affective engagement with the platform, and that engagement predicted intentions to keep using the service and to recommend it.
- Affective engagement was a full mediator — none of the three bonds drove behaviour directly; they worked only through how users felt.
- Engagement with artists and engagement with the platform could not be measured apart. They correlated at .89, producing a negative variance in the model, so the artist construct was dropped from the final specification — every hypothesis involving artists is therefore untested, not disconfirmed.
- Measurement-model fit was acceptable (robust CFI = 0.914, robust RMSEA = 0.066, SRMR = 0.060).
Why it matters
For platforms and labels the usable implication is to invest in all three bonds at once, because each produces a different kind of attachment: discounts produce transactional attachment, live chat produces closeness, reliable service produces trust. Building only on price yields short-term activity with no depth. The finding that forced a construct out of the model is the most practical of all: if listeners cannot separate what they feel about an artist from what they feel about the platform, then switching platforms carries an emotional cost, not merely the cost of installing a different app.
Limits to know before citing this
Snowball sampling skews toward users who were already highly engaged, and the authors note this may inflate the observed relationships. The design is cross-sectional, so it cannot establish sequence. It covers a single platform in a single country. And because the artist construct was removed, this study does not show that artists do not matter — it shows that this instrument could not separate them from the platform. That distinction should not be read past.
Cite this work
Pick a style and copy it straight into your bibliography
Boonchutima, S., Chanapun, N., & Mazahir, I. (2026). 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 & Humanities, 13(1), Article 2675861. https://doi.org/10.1080/23311983.2026.2675861
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