Hanson and colleagues compare popular music and movies as culturally distributed autobiographical cues while simultaneously constructing a normed stimulus resource. In a sample of 248 participants, music excerpts or movie clips were rated for familiarity, autobiographical salience, emotional valence and arousal. Both media contained stimuli capable of cueing memories across a wide age range, but music produced a significantly more pronounced reminiscence bump, indicating a particularly strong relation between music encountered during formative life periods and later autobiographical retrieval. The study’s methodological contribution is to move beyond idiosyncratic self-selected stimuli toward normed popular-media cues while preserving age-related variation. Its conceptual force lies in separating familiarity from autobiographical salience: culturally recognisable objects do not automatically possess equivalent mnemonic power. The comparison with cinema places music within a wider ecology of mediated memory and suggests that different cultural forms organise temporal attachment differently, opening a bridge between cognitive memory research, media studies and the cultural construction of life-course memory.