POPULAR MUSIC, DIGITAL INTERACTION RITUALS, AND GENERATIONAL WELL-BEING
Keywords:
Interaction ritual chains, Popular music, Sentiment analysis, Subjective well-being, Digital music platformsAbstract
Digital listening environments have turned popular music into a recurring social encounter rather than a purely private act of consumption. Using Randall Collins' Interaction Ritual Chains (IRC) as the interpretive frame, this paper examines whether comment-based music engagement is associated with subjective well-being and whether that association differs by generation and platform design. The empirical material comprises 10,215 cleaned comments drawn from more than 13,000 entries attached to 260 songs on NetEase Cloud Music, QQ Music, and TikTok Music, together with cross-generational and three-month longitudinal observations. A platform-adapted sentiment lexicon, emoji-weighted scoring, interaction-network indicators, topic modeling, and regression-oriented comparisons were used to translate shared attention, emotional entrainment, and symbolic boundaries into measurable variables. The older cohort, born in the 1970s and 1980s, displayed a stable upward emotional trajectory in nostalgia-centered settings: positive comments reached 82%, and the change on NetEase Cloud Music was highly significant (p<0.01). Users born in the 1990s and 2000s showed sharper short-term variation, including an initial mean stress response of M=-0.3, but recovered significantly on the short-video platform (p<0.05). Across three months, traditional community-oriented platforms were associated with a 23% rise in emotional energy among older listeners, whereas algorithm-led environments improved recovery efficiency among younger listeners by 40%. The evidence supports a generationally differentiated pathway from music interaction to emotional resonance and then to well-being. It also indicates that nostalgic memory functions may be especially useful for older audiences, while fast, adaptive emotion-regulation features are better aligned with younger users.References
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