Rock Star Stats – death by numbers!
“When you gonna wake up?” might well resound in our musical ears. Bob Dylan’s haunting lyrics apply to some astonishing statistics that analyze the deaths of pop stars and then compares these stats. with the general population.
Pop stars tour the world, party whenever they want and live truly lavish lifestyles but their habits often have a serious downside – they are likely to die much younger than their vocally challenged counterparts.
A professor at Sydney University has studied seven decades of popular musicians’ lifespans and found they were up to 25 years shorter than the comparable US population, in findings published on The Conversation.
Dianna Kenny, Professor of Psychology and Music at University of Sydney, was eager to find out why so many pop stars die young and examined 12,665 stars from all popular genres who died between 1950 and June 2014.
Professor Kenny found that the early 1990s were the peak years for death by suicide for musicians, with the amount of stars taking their own lives rising from 5.9 per cent in the decade before to 9.5 per cent.
But she also discovered that over the six decades she studied, suicide rates were between two and seven times greater in musicians than the US population. As well as suicide, murder is also a big risk for musicians.
The academic revealed that homicide rates were up to eight times greater amongst musicians than the US population. The fatal shootings of Tupac Shakar, who died in 1996 when he was just 25-years-old during a drive-by shooting, and The Notorious B.I.G who died at the age of 24 in 1997, are just two examples from the staggering statistics.
Musician homicide rates peaked at 6.6 per cent in the 1990s after it was just 4 per cent in the 1980s and 5.9 per cent in and around 1970.
Contrastingly, in the 50s and 60s more musicians died from accidents such as plane and car crashes, such as Buddy Holly and Otis Redding.
According to Professor Kenny’s research female musicians tend to die in their early 60s rather than their 80s like the rest of us, whereas male musicians die in their late 50s compared to non-rock stars who die around 75. Read more here
