In 2016, music surrounded me, infiltrating every part of my life. I did not search for it, did not analyze it, and never gave much thought to the people behind it. Songs simply existed around me, playing on loop through shared earphones, Bluetooth speakers in school corridors, and YouTube autoplay that always seemed to know what to play next. My playlists were a mix of Shreya Ghoshal songs and global hits that had taken over the world. At the time, that felt like more than en