This paper takes 14 prefecture-level cities in Liaoning Province as the research object, focusing on how digital technology drives the upgrading of regional cultural industries, and carrying out empirical explorations from the depiction of network structure to the examination of mechanisms. Social network analysis is applied to quantitatively map the spatial association of cultural industries in Liaoning cities. By calculating the centrality of each city, we verify the small-world and scale-free characteristics of cultural industry agglomeration in Liaoning. Based on this, four major paths are proposed under the support of digital technology to promote the upgrading of the cultural industry through innovative processes, innovative cultural products, optimizing the industry chain structure and generating new business forms. The study reveals that there exists an unbalanced network structure in Liaoning Province with Shenyang and Dalian as the dual core, radiating Anshan, Liaoyang and other sub-nodes, while Fuxin and Chaoyang are at the edge. Digital technology, as the strongest factor of industry development, has an impact coefficient as high as 0.7056. Dynamic impulse response analysis shows that there is a short-term peak effect of about 0.036 of the digital shock on the increase of the share of cultural services. The variance decomposition results show that the contribution of digital technology to structural upgrading increases from 23.9% to 44.8% over time, which jointly dominates the development with the industry’s own inertia (47.1%).
