The image of the famous musician has been surrounded by the glamor and excess that fuels popular culture. Behind this mythical idea seems to hide a risk that can be understood, but which a team of researchers has analyzed: living less. The research, which will be published this Wednesday in the journal Journal of Epidemiology and Community Healthsuggests that fame could have a real impact on artists’ life expectancy. Specifically, reducing it by almost five years. The discovery arises from a comparison between professional singers, however differentiated by a single factor: some have achieved fame and others have not.
The study attributes “an average survival time of approximately 4.6 years shorter among famous singers than their counterparts.” According to the study, conducted by Johanna Hepp and a team of researchers from the University of Witten/Herdecke in Germany, famous singers have a 33% higher risk of dying at any given time than their lesser-known peers. They propose that the mortality risk associated with fame is comparable to other known health risks, such as occasional smoking.
Michael Dufner, one of the authors of the research, states that this study arises from previous work related to actors’ narcissism. Because studying a population of famous people is extremely difficult. “How do you do that? How do you access them?” he asks. The solution was to opt for a similar object of study, but with more possibilities for observation. “We thought maybe we could analyze celebrity mortality, because this data is available in public archives,” says this professor of psychology and personality diagnosis.
An amateur twin
Unlike previous research that compared famous musicians to the general population, the researchers sought to isolate the fame factor from the music profession. To do this, they constructed an experiment: they paired 324 famous singers with 324 lesser-known singers.
They used the Acclaimed Music catalogue, created by Scottish statistician Henrik Franzon, which focuses on lists of professional music critics; while less famous singers were searched on discogs.com. Each artist had a twin to compare. This couple had to have the same gender, nationality, ethnicity, musical style, role (soloist or band member), and year of birth.
The researchers analyzed the sample of 648 musicians from Europe and North America. 83.5% were men and 16.5% were women. The majority belonged to the Rock genre (65%), followed by R&B (14%), Pop (9%), New Wave (6%), Rap (4%) and Electronic (2%). The celebrity couples were nearly identical, except for one detail: their level of public recognition.
Statistics show that famous musicians live about four and a half years less than their less popular colleagues. “Comparing twins allowed us to ensure that each pair agreed on the variables we decided to use,” explains Dufner.
The study also found that solo artists have a higher mortality rate than those working in bands. According to the researchers, belonging to a musical group was associated with a 26% lower risk of death compared to soloists.
Werther effect
Musicians who achieve fame in North America and Europe have historically shown a mortality risk two to three times higher than that of the general population, and various research has indicated that their suicide rate may be two to seven times higher than the national average in the United States.
For the authors, this reality has broader social effects. The death of iconic characters, especially by suicide, can trigger spikes in imitation in the general population, a phenomenon well known as the Werther effect, a suicide imitation phenomenon coined by the sociologist David Phillips in 1974, and which owes its name to Goethe’s novel The misadventures of young Werther.
What kills stars?
The researchers acknowledge the study’s limitations. For example, it does not address differences based on specific causes of death, but points to a number of possible mechanisms supported by previous literature, such as the pressure of lifelong exposure, normalization of substance use, a history of childhood difficulties, and solo loneliness.
Dufner believes it is likely that substance abuse plays an important role, but insists that the mechanisms that increase the mortality of famous musicians remain unclear.
It also points to other possible factors, such as social isolation and pressure. “Several factors are probably involved. But our study can’t prove it; it’s all speculation,” he admits.
