Elvis+to+Eminem+Quantifying+the+Price+of+Fame+through+Early+Mortality+of+European+and+North+American+Rock+and+Pop+Stars

Bellis, Mark A., Tom Hennell, Clare Lushey, Karen Hughes, Karen Tocque, and John R. Ashton6. "Elvis to Eminem: Quantifying the Price of Fame through Early Mortality of European and North American Rock and Pop Stars." Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health. U.S. National Library of Medicine, 6 Apr. 2007. Web. 01 Mar. 2017. .

Bellis, Hennell, Lushey, Hughes, Tocque, and Ashton explore the mortality rate among musicians as compared to the mortality rate of the general population. For their research, the authors took into consideration the musicians’: birthdates, survival status, death dates, and causes of death. Using graphs, they compared the mortality rates to the amount of time the artists or bands had been famous (based on their earliest album within the ‘All Time Top 1000 Albums’ chart published by Virgin Publishing in 2000.) They also compared the mortality rates between gender, as well as both North American artists and European artists, using various charts and tables.

The authors of this research report (all of whom are involved in a career in the public health field) effectively quantify early morbidity rates of the musicians in question; however, their lack of diversity in genre, country of origin, and musicians included severely limits the credibility of their findings. By only using data for artists or bands who were included in the ‘All Time Top 1000 Albums’ the group begins with a narrow pool of evidence to draw from, this becomes even more problematic when one considers that their main source of data was published seven years before their report was published. They go on to filter themselves into an even smaller realm of data by choosing to exclude artists that are not European, Canadian, or American. The pool of musicians becomes even more minuscule when they exclude genres other than rock, punk, rap, R&B, electronica and new age. If it were not for the fact that this report’s results were very similar to other studies of the same nature, it would be useless to the topic of why the rate of mortality is higher with musicians.