Misreading and Riding the Wave: Configurational Mechanisms of Overseas Audiences’ Reception of Chinese Traditional Music—A Mixed-Method Study Using BERTopic and fsQCA

The digital circulation of cultural heritage is increasingly reshaped by platform algorithms and participatory culture. Yet prior research often overlooks the dynamic interplay between audience semantics and algorithmic distribution. This study examines how overseas audiences reconstruct the meanings of Chinese traditional music on YouTube. Using BERTopic and fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA), we analyze 32,999 comments posted under 106 representative videos. The semantic analysis identifies six core cognitive dimensions, ranging from Aesthetic Resonance to Functional Utility and Platform Friction. A temporal analysis reveals a clear shift in audience attention: from relatively static aesthetic appreciation toward a dual-track mechanism dominated by functional needs and IP-driven cultural associations. Configurational analysis further shows that communication success does not rely solely on aesthetic consensus. Instead, it is generated through three distinct causal mechanisms: (1) a pragmatist route, where music is consumed as a functional tool for tasks or sleep; (2) a pop-culture leveraging route, where related media lowers entry barriers and facilitates cultural access; and (3) a controversy-driven route, where political memes and algorithm-related frictions amplify visibility. Overall, these findings suggest that, in the algorithmic era, cross-cultural music communication is shifting from essentialist aesthetic appreciation to contextualized consumption. We propose a novel theoretical framework that integrates semantic mining with configurational causality, offering insights for navigating the attention economy in global digital cultural dissemination.