This paper is a qualitative research about rock and heavy metal music tourism in the capital city of Finland, Helsinki. As Helsinki can be considered the city of contrasts, the silent nature city mixed with urban activities, it is important to also use the potential of the loud rock and heavy metal music contrasting the silence. Finland is known abroad for bands such as HIM, Nightwish, Korpiklaani and Children of Bodom so it would make sense to utilize these in the tourism sector as well. The cultural tourism possibilities of heavy metal and rock music visitors are discussed in this thesis, and whether there are products and services already available for this type of visitors or not. In this paper the research method was mainly qualitative research method and also the project method was used in combination to achieve the results. This is because the thesis first started out as the researchers’ own project, which is referred to in this paper as the piloting project, and grew into an idea of a thesis.
This project that started the thesis process created a heavy metal oriented marketing video which would also be a virtual tour guide for visitors. The video was planned, all the contents discussed, and filmed, edited and the finally published by the research team in the fall of 2011. This thesis is a project with the aim to find out how the video could be improved, to find out more concrete evidence of what kind of content this type of video service and product should contain according to the interviews conducted for this thesis. Furthermore, the thesis is about finding out whether products and services exist for these types of travelers. Or do these services exist at all. Yet another thing this paper discusses is whether it is a good idea to publish this sort of service and product via online communities, or if there are some other ways to share this information in this video product to these travellers; or if there is potentially another network to show the video to these customers.
Contrary to the expectations the researchers had about only improving the marketing video, the theme interview answers indicated something even more. The results from the research were more than the researchers had predicted. Instead of only a marketing video, the subjects’ answers to the theme interviews predicted that there should also be a website with social features
