What makes Chinese ancient-style pop songs appealing? The roles of song quality and emotional resonance

Chinese ancient-style pop songs integrate traditional cultural elements with contemporary popular music, and have developed a relatively stable audience base, but the mechanisms underlying listeners’ song preferences remain insufficiently understood from a systematic empirical perspective. Based on Stimulus–Organism–Response (SOR) theory, this study builds a research model with lyric quality, melody quality, arrangement quality, audio production quality and vocal performance quality serve as antecedents, emotional resonance acts as a mediator, and song liking is treated as the outcome variable. Through 924 valid questionnaires, this study employs Partial Least Squares Structural Equation Modeling (PLS-SEM) to test the proposed hypotheses, and applies Importance–Performance Map Analysis (IMPA), Relative Importance Analysis (RIA), and a procedure for assessing out-of-sample predictive power (PLSpredict) to examine factor importance, ranking robustness, and predictive relevance. The results show that all five song components have a significant positive impact on emotional resonance and song liking. Emotional resonance also significantly improves song liking and plays a complementary partial mediating role. Further analysis shows that emotional resonance is the primary factor affecting song liking; among the components of songs that can be optimized, lyric quality is the most critical, followed by vocal performance quality. The PLSpredict results further demonstrate that the model has good out-of-sample predictive relevance. This study extends the application of SOR theory in the study of music acceptance, and provides an empirical basis for the creation and production optimization of Chinese ancient-style pop songs.