As anybody who's watched VH1's "Behind the Music" documentary series knows, rock stardom can be risky business.
Now a team of academics in the U.K. has attempted to quantify that risk, comparing the likelihood of a premature death among rock and pop stars with the general population.
The conclusion: If longevity is your objective, choose another line of work. And if you must be a pop musician, join a band. Solo performers were twice as likely to die early as members of a group were.
The research examined 1,489 stars of pop, rock, hip-hop and punk, of whom 137, or 9.2%, died during the five-decade period covered by the study. Nearly 39% of those deaths were caused by factors related to violence or alcohol and drug intake.
Lest anyone miss the point, Mark Bellis, an expert on substance abuse and violence prevention in Britain, and his co-authors titled their paper "Dying to be Famous."
The study, to be published Thursday in the British Medical Journal, examined the lives and deaths of North American and European performers who achieved fame between 1956 and 2006. Jazz, folk and other nonmainstream artists were excluded, as were performers from other parts of the world. The study used acts' first appearances on a Top 40 chart as proxies for the date they attained fame.
The performers were then compared with members of the general population with similar demographic characteristics. "Hence, Elvis Presley, whose first album was released in January 1956, was matched to the survival probabilities of the cohort of U.S. white men aged 21 in 1955," the authors said. Forty years after attaining fame, North American pop stars were 87.6% as likely to be alive as normal people of the same age and ethnicity—the lowest survival rate of any group identified in the study.
The researchers used publicly available information to determine cause of death. Unsurprisingly, overdosing on drugs or alcohol was by far the most common. They also scoured media reports and the like to determine whether the dead performer had endured "adverse childhood experiences," such as physical abuse, which also were strongly correlated with an early death. Echoing themes found in many Hollywood biopics, the study found that wealth and fame may not protect against repercussions from early traumas. The correlation "brings into question whether even almost limitless resources in adulthood can undo the impacts of adverse childhoods."
Mr. Bellis, director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, declined to provide the list of performers until after the study is published, saying he wanted to avoid arguments over a particular performer's cause of death, or what kind of childhood trauma he or she may or may not have endured. The paper does identify a handful of performers covered by the study, both dead (Kurt Cobain, Janis Joplin, Whitney Houston) and living (Lady Gaga, Phil Collins, Sting).
The study doesn't address a widely held belief that drummers are more prone to early death than other musicians. That notion spans a range of real-life percussionists—John Bonham of Led Zeppelin and Keith Moon of the Who—and fictional ones such as the string of dead drummers described in the film "This Is Spinal Tap." There are too many musicians who are multi-instrumentalists to allow such an analysis, Mr. Bellis said.
In North America, 23% of solo performers died, versus 10% of band-only stars, the study found. The comparable figures for Europe were 10% versus 5%. The study called for future inquiries into "whether bands provide a mutual-support mechanism that offers protective health effects."
The study also noted that a lot of premature mortality is hidden from fans who may be familiar with the direct impact of substance abuse, such as Amy Winehouse's death in 2011, but may not recognize the longer-term consequences for disease, such as cancer, heart disorders and mental health problems.
Among the stereotypes that the study appears to support: The 1960s and '70s were more debauched than subsequent decades. Or, in the dry terminology of statistical analysis: "Reaching fame from 1980 onwards was independently associated with a higher relative survival."
Mr. Bellis said one possible explanation is the professionalization of the music industry. Music may have become more akin to a valid career choice than simply a way out of difficult circumstances.