The Student Mobile Project is a pilot initiative aimed at increasing the market spread and depth of the London Barbican based orchestras, the London Symphony Orchestra and Aurora Orchestra. This project focuses specifically on engagement with students, as one example of a 'hard-to-reach' audience for classical music, by introducing a marketing and ticketing web-channel and mobile (iOS and Android-based) application.

This initiative is being led for a University of Salford research team, consisting of Dr Garry Crawford, Dr Gaynor Bagnall, Dr Victoria Gosling and Prof. Ben Light.

The research will bring added value to the development and implementation of new forms of ticketing and marketing, by providing a detailed understanding of participants' attitudes towards classical music and their experiences and uses of new media technologies.  

Building upon existing research into audience patterns, this project employs a mixed-method approach to research a primary sample group of 18-25 year old students. The research includes a series of focus group, and 'at interface', interviews with student participants, a small number of one-to-one interviews with box office and technical staff, selected analysis of web analytics data, and a series of textual analyses of the technologies' architecture, interface and affordances.

As well as the dissemination of findings through the usual academic channel of conference presentations and journal papers, findings from the research will be fed into the ongoing development of the apps, web-channels and London Symphony Orchestra’s ongoing relationship with their audiences.

Additionally, lessons learnt, and models developed during this project, will be of benefit to other cultural organisations, and rolled-out to other 'hard-to-reach' groups.