Audience engagement is attracting increasing attention in various academic disciplines.
During the past few years, the industry- and technology-oriented conceptualizations of
engagement have been challenged by a more audience-oriented understanding. This article
aims at contributing to the development of a more nuanced audience-oriented approach.
First, we make a theoretical contribution by bringing together the still limited literature on
engagement and its disparate conceptualisations; secondly, we use the analysis of an
empirical case study to demonstrate audience engagement as a set of experiences. Our
analysis builds on the empirical material produced by two rounds of exploratory focus
groups with viewers of musical talent shows in four locations: Saarbrücken/Germany,
London/UK, Tampere/Finland and Aarhus/Denmark. From this we identified a number of
modes of engagement which derive from both textual and contextual factors. These include
character engagement, habitual and ritualistic engagement, and ludic engagement. We also
discovered that audiences at times disengage or actively resist engagement.