DescriptionThe first essay examines the gender differences in the U.S. millennial consumer’s emotional and behavioral responses toward foreign contemporary music (e.g., K-pop or Latin pop) based on the media richness theory and cognitive psychology which presents men and women’s different attention-paying behaviors toward auditory and visual stimulus. Based on the theoretical framework, I manipulate the richness of media conveying foreign contemporary music in 2 (visual cues: audio streaming vs. video streaming) x 2 (language: English vs. foreign native) x 2 (gender: male vs. female) between-subjects factorial design. Three-way ANOVA is used to test the main effect and the interaction effects of visual cues (audio vs. video) and language (English vs. foreign native language) in media richness and the gender differences. In today’s contemporary music scene in the U.S., artists from all around the world are eager to enter the U.S. contemporary music market and release songs and music videos in English in consequence. The advance of web technology in social media environments enables foreign artists to reach U.S. consumers easier than ever before. Therefore, this study will be able to contribute to not only consumer behavior academic literature but also real world marketing practice related to today’s contemporary music consumption context in which audio and video-based social media are heavily used and foreign artists perform in English and foreign native language. The second essay examines U.S. Millennials’ responses to contemporary music by foreign artists who possibly enter the U.S contemporary music market. Their behavioral responses are possibly initiated by two stimuli: social media contents and foreign contemporary music related contents on social media. These stimuli influence their emotional and behavioral responses. Consumers’ behavioral responses are reflected as impulse paid-consumption of foreign contemporary music, sharing foreign contemporary music on social media sites, future paid-consumption of foreign contemporary music, intention to join the artist’s page on social media to interact with them, and intention to recommend foreign contemporary music to peers. For the theoretical framework, this study adopts Stimulus-Organism-Response (S-O-R) model to discover the relationships among stimulus, cognitive/emotional responses, and behavioral responses. Survey method is used to collect data and the result is analyzed by structural equation modeling (SEM).