


































Communication, Society and Media 
ISSN 2576-5388 (Print) ISSN 2576-5396 (Online) 

Vol. 7, No. 1, 2024 

www.scholink.org/ojs/index.php/csm 

45 

 

Original Paper 

The Communication Mechanism of Digital Music on National 

Culture in the New Media Era 

ShiJie Wan
1* 

1 
Shanghai University, Shanghai, China 

* 
ShiJie Wan, Shanghai University, Shanghai, China 

 

Received: May 20, 2024           Accepted: June 10, 2024        Online Published: June 29, 2024 

doi:10.22158/csm.v7n1p45                       URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.22158/csm.v7n1p45 

 

Abstract 

The concept of “multidimensional integration” is a prominent theme and developmental trend in 

today’s music communication. The digital music industry, which stores music in digital formats and 

transmits it through the internet and wireless networks, is showing vigorous development momentum 

empowered by technology. As a convergent medium, digital music has strong penetration and easy 

breakout characteristics in cultural communication. Drawing on Simon Frith’s research on music, 

combined with the local practice of digital music, this paper discusses how music communication in the 

entertainment industry and the national culture it contains can survive and go international. 

Keywords 

communication science, digital music, cultural communication 

 

1. Introduction 

Traditional media sociology has always focused on “serious” and “heavy” media products. Although 

“entertainment” is an important ideological structure of media and is closely linked to news and art, 

under the perspective of elitism, entertainment is regarded as a pejorative term similar to “intellectual 

inferiority” and is difficult to enter the center of academic research. To provide a meaningful 

interpretation of entertainment, Simon Frith starts from the commodity, takes the oldest form of 

entertainment—music as the research object, and carries out academic research on popular music, 

discussing the impact of music on social culture, the operation mode of the music industry, and how 

music affects the audience’s emotional experience. 

In recent years, China’s digital music market has grown rapidly, and the “music +” ecological industry 

chain of online and offline integration performances and virtual music festivals is gradually taking 

shape (Zhang & Li, 2020). Short video music creation has become a new channel for users to 



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participate in the communication of digital music culture. Therefore, this paper first analyzes the 

conditions for the flow of digital music, and then studies the cultural communication mechanism of 

digital music from the aspects of deconstruction and construction of music symbols, multimodal 

experience of music, and empathetic communication of music, to explore how to promote the national 

culture in music to the world. 

 

2. Conditions for Music Flow in the New Media Era 

2.1 Technological Advancements Provide Carriers for Music Communication 

Simon Frith pointed out that the ever-changing technology provides the music industry with the 

functions of “storage” and “reproduction”. Music has evolved from the first stage of immediate 

appreciation and human brain storage to the second stage of music storage in the form of musical 

scores and then to the third stage of the invention of storage carriers and the mass sale of music 

products. The communication of music has also evolved from the natural communication of “word of 

mouth”, the communication of musical score symbols, the communication of record technology, to 

today’s mobile terminal communication. 

Against the backdrop of the rise of the UGC (User-Generated Content) model post-Web 2.0, 

technology has not only provided a storage medium for the communication of music but has also 

facilitated the development of various mobile clients, creating a new platform for musical media. These 

platforms offer an effective medium for the interactive participation and emotional expression of 

interest-based communities. The immediacy and decentralization of the Internet have broken the 

limitations that only artists could compose music, allowing the audience to transition from being mere 

recipients to providers of content, participating in the creation of music. Concurrently, propelled by the 

development of AIGC (Artificial Intelligence Generated Content), the barriers to music production and 

distribution have been lowered, transforming the static experience of music into a “fluid experience,” 

providing technical support for the creation of music. Similar to the Crowdsourcing Journalism where 

the public spontaneously participates in news investigations and production, the Internet enables the 

audience to autonomously engage in music creation, promoting the production and communication of 

music. 

In Internet social platforms primarily led by TikTok, the ample autonomy in user content creation is 

respected, and the audience’s re-creation of music also reflects their fragmented Internet product usage 

habits and the demand for emotional expression in content. According to data from TikTok’s music 

charts, the duration of the top ten songs is controlled within about one minute, with nearly seventy 

percent of the music lasting around half a minute. The integrity of music is stripped away, with short 

melodic sections replacing the natural integrity of music, moving from natural music to mimetic music, 

aligning with the audience’s fragmented media tendency characteristics. 



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2.2 Music as a Medium—Audience Empathy under Media Affordance 

Simon Frith posits that what is directly provided to the public constitutes primary “entertainment”. 

When entertainment is catered to groups of the entertainment public, it is regarded as secondary 

entertainment mediated through the medium, and music is no exception. Music, which appeals to the 

auditory senses and emotional experiences, inherently possesses a stronger communicative power 

compared to print media and textual symbols. It can stream across various boundaries of time and 

space, sharing the fluidity and portability common with new media, capable of creating interactive and 

immersive experiences for the audience, thereby facilitating emotional resonance. 

In the current era where communication technology is rapidly advancing, media technology enables the 

behavior of the audience and generates specific stimuli that place the audience within particular 

contexts (Dong, Li, & Liu, 2020). For instance, TikTok offers semi-thematic short music video 

production, providing users with video production templates or background music to inspire their 

creative ideas, encouraging them to integrate music with body language and facial expressions during 

the video shooting process. The audience can create their own music videos through performance forms 

such as gesture dances or solo dances. In this process, the audience not only expresses their emotions 

but also gains affirmation and strengthens their sense of belonging to the group through interaction with 

others, achieving a sense of self-satisfaction and heightened emotional energy. 

 

3. How Can the National Culture in Digital Music Go Global 

3.1 Constructing and Deconstructing Musical Cultural Symbols 

In contemporary culture, “transmedia music” has become the primary mode of musical expression. As 

a medium, music interacts with other media to combine auditory symbols with visual and linguistic 

symbols, presenting a variety of meaning patterns that promote the integration of sound and image. For 

instance, music in films, musicals, and games coordinates with the visual imagery to form diegetic or 

non-diegetic sounds, establishing different semantic relationships such as “correspondence”, 

“counterpoint”, and “opposition” with the primary medium (Tian, 2018), aiding in the semantic 

expression of cultural communication. However, the construction of musical symbols is predicated on 

shared cultural customs and conventions, meaning that only specific ethnic groups or audiences with a 

common culture can decode and access this culture, while “outsiders” outside of the culture may 

struggle to interpret the cultural connotations endowed in the music. 

At the same time, music as a symbol is not only endowed with meaning in information communication 

but also possesses a powerful expressive capacity in metaphorical emotional expression. French 

semiotician Jean-Jacques Nattiez points out that musical symbols have a dual nature; the phonetic and 

tonal structures of musical language constitute the “signifier” of the musical symbol, triggering 

associations with music. Compared to the “signified” composed of the textual meaning of music, the 



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“signifier” is received by the audience first and has a significant advantage in communication, 

promoting the audience to elaborate on the “signified” after feeling the emotional expression of the 

music. 

It can be seen that cultural communication in digital music is a process where the transmitter constructs 

musical symbols and language codes, and the audience feels the “signifier” of the musical symbols and 

interprets the “signified” in the process of deconstruction. Therefore, the author believes that to 

globalize the communication of national culture in digital music, it is necessary to interpret the text of 

the music and the local cultural codes to promote communication between people and musical symbols, 

between people and the national culture contained in the musical symbols, and among audiences of 

different ethnicities. 

3.2 Enhancing Multimodal Experiences in Music Communication 

Information communication under the integration of all media has multimodal and multidimensional 

composite characteristics, providing possibilities for the visualization of music communication. With 

the aid of visual imagery, barriers between different cultures are broken down, and the connotations and 

implications of music can be more directly perceived by the audience (LI, 2019). At the same time, 

linguistic memes in the music communication process also build a bridge for the communication 

among audiences from different cultural backgrounds. The more languages the used linguistic memes 

can span, the broader the scope of cross-cultural communication, and the higher the openness of 

audience participation. 

Simon Frith points out in “Entertainment” that the entertainment industry is a talent industry. 

Cross-cultural video communication requires more professional text settings, coherent soundtracks, 

professional camera language, and picture quality (Wu & Yan, 2016). To enhance the multimodality in 

music cultural communication, guidance and control by journalism professionals are needed to ensure 

the quality of video production and avoid misinterpretation of culture by the audience. In addition, the 

process of song recommendation on the TikTok platform mentioned earlier also demonstrates the key 

role of opinion leaders in music communication. In the communication of music culture, the influence 

of opinion leaders in various countries should be leveraged to promote the global communication of 

music and national culture. 

Therefore, to tell the story of the national culture in music, video creators need to use visual 

information and linguistic memes to immerse the audience in the cultural charm of music through 

character shaping, costume matching, performance situation setting, musical instrument display, and 

other forms, enriching media expression and achieving the virtual presence of the audience. At the 

same time, the talent force in the music industry should control the quality of cross-cultural video 

content output and leverage the influence of opinion leaders in video communication to promote the 

global flow of culture in music. 



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3.3 Shaping Collective Memory in Cross-Cultural Contexts through Empathetic Communication 

The communication of music is a process where the communicator and the recipient interact and 

provide feedback due to a shared focus—music, leading to emotional resonance, which constitutes a 

complete model of the interaction ritual chain. Emotional energy, as a core element in the interaction 

ritual chain, is an important driving force in the interaction between individuals and society.  

Taking the decentralized field constructed by TikTok short videos as an example, under the availability 

of technology, the barriers of time and space are broken by new media technologies, increasing the 

authenticity of physical presence, and the audience’s emotional experience is also more intense. The 

audience is given the space for personal expression and free speech, and can selectively participate in 

topics related to the music they are interested in, promoting the push of music-related videos through 

likes, shares, and comments, interacting with creators, and encouraging the continuous production of 

music creators. 

The author believes that the communication of music is not only due to the invisible social network 

composed of groups with the same musical interests that breaks the limitations of time and space, but 

more importantly, the audience’s need for emotional resonance in the relationship of interest. Only 

internet products with strong emotional power can stand out from a large amount of information and 

win the favor of users. Under the stimulation of music, the audience, combining their personal 

cognition of music, induces the emotional tone of the music, resonates emotionally with the music 

creators, and identifies with the group, satisfying their own emotional catharsis needs. 

In international communication, empathetic communication is regarded as an important way to shape 

the national image and tell the national story. Therefore, in the process of shaping the collective 

memory of music across cultures, narrative methods should be used to shape or tell touching cultural 

stories related to music, making the communication of music more three-dimensional, triggering 

emotional resonance among audiences from different cultural backgrounds, and actively using music 

platform accounts in social interactions to shape collective memory, and enhancing the overseas 

communication capability of music culture. 

 

4. Conclusion 

With the development and empowerment of technology, the conditions for music flow have changed, 

and the boundaries between production and consumption have become blurred due to digital 

technology. The reduction in the difficulty of technological access decentralizes the power of music 

production to the public, providing a foundation for users to participate in music creation with 

subjective initiative. Communicators, under the interaction ritual chain model, use the availability of 

technology to provide a bridge for the audience to establish emotional connections, and embed this 

model in the process of song promotion, playing the role of opinion leaders to promote a feedback loop 



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between the audience and users. The audience’s emotional interaction and the need for self-expression 

are satisfied in the process of media contact, becoming the main force in the production of short video 

music. The indigenous national culture in music, under the background of media convergence, should 

not only increase the exchange between music media and other media, enhance the audience’s 

multi-sensory experience, and establish collective memory through narrative storytelling to promote 

emotional resonance between overseas audiences and culture, but also timely explain and structure the 

“signified” of musical symbols to facilitate cross-cultural communication and exchange. 

 

References 

Dong, X., Li, J. Y., Liu, X. Y. (2020). Music, sense and Time and Space: Nature and mimicry in Douyin. 

Youth Reporter, 12, 82-83. 

LI, J. (2019). Interactive Ritual and Emotional Mobilization in the communication of Douyin Short 

video. News and Writing, 07, 86-89. 

Tian, G. J. (2018). Research on short music videos from the perspective of Interactive ritual chain: A 

case study of Douyin App. New Media Research, 4(04), 22-23. 

Wu, D., & Yan, S. J. (2016). Research on Interactive ritual chain Model of Network subculture groups. 

Modern Communication (Journal of Communication University of China), 38(03), 17-20. 

Zhang, W. J., & Li, S. W. (2020). The popular phenomenon of short music video from the perspective 

of communication: A case study of Douyin APP. Public Standardization, 04, 170-172. 


