The Soundtrack of Your Life

Contained within your brain there pulses a never-ending music; melodies and rhythms that do not need to be actively heard to resonate deep within you. This music is ever-present, though it exists primarily in the background of your waking hours. You carry it with you wherever you may roam and often this music surges into your conscious mind and catapults you into the past. This rush is heralded by a flood of emotions which are accompanied by a parade of memories powerful enough to rip you out of your daily grind and set you traveling through time. 

That music is the soundtrack of your life. 

The soundtrack of your life comprises and defines entire periods of your past, songs intermingling with memories in an aural/neurochemical quadrille. Not all the music that you’ve ever heard ends up as a part of your soundtrack, but rather it consists of those songs which both deepened and augmented those core memories which shaped you that when combined, make you who you have become. Some songs exalt - invoking moments of triumph in your past and cultivating feelings of joy and contentment, curiosity and accomplishment. Some songs assault – conjuring ghosts and hurts from a previous version of you, unearthing feelings of betrayal or shame, loss or loneliness. Be those associations positive or negative, they are undeniably powerful, capable of emerging seemingly from nowhere and with surprising potency evoking memories and sensations that you thought long since dormant.

The soundtrack of your life is unique to you and yet, despite the countless number of songs that exist in the world, you inevitably share many songs in common with 8 billion other humans on this planet thanks to modern technology and the profusion of popular culture. And while those songs travel with you along your life’s journey, how often do you stop to think about the artists who wrote these songs from which you derive such joy and connection? 

Answer – likely on occasion, but for as prominent as music is to society the honest answer is... not enough.

Those musical artists’ contributions have undeniably added depth and texture to your experience as a human being and as such what value would you put on those memories which make up your life? Recall the awkward middle school dance where that one girl, against all odds, actually said ‘yes’ and danced with you. Think about the moment when you received that phone call where an official voice on the other end offered you that job. Bask in the magic of seeing your child’s eyes light up with wonder at Xmas morning. For most of us we would be unable to assign a monetary value to such abstraction, but it is highly likely that you can relive those memories and a thousand others like them, at will, just by pressing <Play> on the proper song. The ironic reality of the situation is that to the musician who wrote and recorded that music, those songs were likely a means to an end; they were a way to pay their rent and/or the artistic result of coping with one of life’s curve balls. And most likely the compensation paid to that musician was far lower than the value which those songs would provide to you by becoming part of who you are.

The purpose of this initial piece is to call attention to the fact that there is disparity between the worth of music in our personal lives and the value we assign to music in an economic context. The first step to creating systemic change is to realize that music is work. There is value that goes beyond the monetary sense of the word. And because music provides deep value to the essence of who we are as humans and enriches our lives, then society need to figure out how to compensate our artists properly, eliminating the starving artist archetype and empower them to focus on creating the soundtrack of our lives. If we are incapable or unwilling to acknowledge the value music adds to who we are, then what does that say about how we value our memories and by extension our own lives?