To explore the mechanism between lifestyle and college students' online music purchase intention. A sample of 2011 college students was investigated in the study to complete lifestyle scale, online music perceived value scale, neuroticism scale and purchase intention scale. Data was collected and analyzed using Mplus 8.3 and SPSS 25.0 software. Confirmatory factor analyses indicated that models fit the data satisfactorily for lifestyle and college students' online music purchase intention, and bias-corrected percentile Bootstrap method was used to analyze the mediating effect of online music perceived value and the moderating effect of neuroticism between lifestyle and college students' online music purchase intention. The results showed that: fashion taste, perfectionism and advocating freedom positively predicted online music purchase intention of college students. The perceived value of online music played a part mediation role between fashion taste and college students' online music purchase intention. The perceived value of online music played a complete mediation role between advocating freedom and college students' online music purchase intention. The perceived value of online music played a cover effect between moderation and aggressiveness and college students' online music purchase intention. Neuroticism played a moderation role between online music perceived value and college students' online music purchase intention. In summary, the current study constructed a moderated mediation model of perceived value of online music and neuroticism to reveal the mechanisms underlying the relationship between lifestyle and college students' online music purchase intention. These findings contribute to understanding how and when lifestyle effect college students' online music purchase intention. In addition, in future research, we should pay attention to: first, for the effect size, the mediation effects in the present study were not large. This means that the results should be interpreted with caution, it is necessary to further explore other potential influence variables in the future research; second, this study only briefly examines the regulatory effect of neuroticism, whether variables such as gender and online word-of-mouth also regulate the relationship between perceived value of online music and online music purchase intention, which needs to be further discussed; moreover, as a cross-sectional study, it is impossible to explore the impact of lifestyle on college students' online music purchase intention at different stages, future research can improve this by using longitudinal research.