The composition of the author of The Book of Songs is very complicated, and it has a wide range of regions. In addition to the music songs produced by the music officials of the Zhou Dynasty, and the music songs presented by the officials and scholars, there are many folk songs that were originally circulated among the people. There are different opinions about how these folk songs came to the court. Some scholars in the Han Dynasty believed that the Zhou Dynasty sent special poets to collect folk songs to understand the pros and cons of politics and customs. There is another saying: these folk songs are collected by musicians from all over the world. Musicians are officials and experts in charge of music. They sing poems and compose music as their profession, and collect ballads to enrich their lyrics and tunes. The pleasure of the princes was dedicated to the emperor, and these folk songs were gathered in the court. These statements all have some truth.

It is generally believed that the music songs collected from various regions in different times were preserved in the music official of the Zhou royal family-Taishi. They obviously processed, eliminated and modified those works with different faces. Therefore, the language form of the existing Book of Songs is basically four-character, and the rhyme system and rhyme rules are basically the same, and some sets of sentences appear in works from different times and places (such as "the son of another" and "Wang Shi Mi"). In ancient times, the transportation was inconvenient, the languages were different, and the ballads of various times and regions could not have happened if they had not been processed and sorted out. It can be considered that the official production of music songs and the collection and arrangement of folk music songs are one of the cultural undertakings of the Zhou Dynasty, which is constantly going on in the era of the Book of Songs.