It is not stated explicitly in the article, but the implication seems to be that fame causes a higher mortality risk.
Whereas my intuition is that there are traits that help you become famous (competitiveness, savant syndrome, prioritization of success over happiness, etc.) that also raise your mortality risk.
That’s probably a factor in some way but my intuition is it’s the lifestyle itself that’s the dominant risk.
The control point is comparing to less famous musicians. I’d assume many of which have similar personality traits and desire for fame. But when it doesn’t materialize, their personality traits arent causing them to die early.
The lifestyle of constantly partying, drugs, sex, little consequences, money, excess, etc. Versus the less famous musician who has to function like an adult, stresses over their mortgage, etc. Is sure to have a variance with respect to mortality.
I agree with this. Tony Hsieh (founder of Zappos) also ended up dead because of the lifestyle enabled by his wealth, and he wasn't a famous musician. The wealth also led to lots of hangers on around him that didn't care about his well being, just personally benefiting.
> The lifestyle of constantly partying, drugs, sex, little consequences, money, excess, etc.
I don't know how much truth there is to it, some musicians are famous for that, but touring is far from easy, musicians move a lot and have to give their best every time when they are on stage. Especially singers, as their body is their instrument, they can't really afford to be out of shape. I am sure that after big public events like concerts, the thing musicians really want is to get done with it and go to sleep, not party all night. There may be drugs involved, but I'd expect it to be more about enhancing performance than recreation.
And that would apply to all professional musicians, famous or not. For most, I'd say what is excessive is their job, not the life of partying famous people are said to have.
> The control point is comparing to less famous musicians.
Maybe, although an alternative explanation would be that those musicians with the strongest traits are the ones that succeed, and that same strength of those traits also leads to early mortality.
Anything is possible. But wouldn’t that kind of also mean those traits are necessary for talent? For recognition? For art that is appreciated?
I don’t know if I buy it myself as being a big contributing factor. The lifestyles of famous people are well known to be indulgent. So that seems like a more direct explanation. But anything is possible
On the other other hand, success in music is at least partly luck.[1] So there should be some not-quite-successful musicians who are similar in most respects but actual success.
I think this is a very valid hypothesis but it's hard to control for in experiments, since if these traits are necessary to become (or stay) famous, we don't really have a control group.
Even if you don't do all the drugs and have an agent running around slapping McDoubles out of everyone's hands the health effects of simply living on the road and touring are not great.
I wonder how these results would stack up against something like pro baseball players or pro cyclists - both have a very long season (6 month season for baseball, even longer for cyclists). Maybe a bit like touring bands.
Three main differences that come to mind...
- athletes repeat this annually (famous touring musicians might take a year or two off to record new material).
- athletes likely live a healthier overall lifestyle because being extremely fit is part of the job. Plus the teams have embedded MDs and other health support staff (some musicians will, some won't).
- athletes usually retire from their primary sport in their 30s, so only ~20 years of touring on the high end, where musicians can tour into their 50s or 60s (or beyond for a few).
It cuts both ways - in those environments, very unhealthy lifestyles (high stress, drug abuse…) are quite common, if not the norm, so even people starting with healthy lifestyles are under significant pressure.
1) It's in the title: "The Price of Fame" implies that there are downsides to becoming famous, rather than there are downsides to having traits that might make you famous.
2) While the abstract merely claims "associated with" (which is correlation not causation), the phrase "beyond occupational factors" implies that the authors felt they removed important non-causal factors, hinting at likely causal relationship.
And yes, any causality implications are completely unfounded, and so this paper is of low quality.
Becoming Led Zeppelin is a great documentary which chronicles the band’s rise. It has some great quotes from Plant about the milieu that fathers around a famous band, supplying drugs and sex. The substances lead to abuse, addiction and sometimes overdoses. LZ’s drummer Bonham choked in his own vomit during sleep after taking 40 shots. Page became addicted to several substances. Many famous singers if they survive are recovering from some form of addiction. Bowie, for example. There’s a culture they enter with fame and travel that is hard to escape.
Read Geddy Lee's "My Effin' Life" autobio...the amount of coke Rush used for quite some time came as a big, big surprise to me! And Alex Lifeson has been a huge stoner since forever.
Are you asking if a drug and sex fueled lifestyle is still pursued today by musicians? The answer sadly is yes. There are lots of musicians that don’t go full throttle but most of the highly famous ones are running the red line. This is the OP’s point. Whether it’s the person amplified by the lifestyle that makes them famous or it’s the fame that enables the lifestyle that allows them to destroy themselves.
Speaking of roads, everyone points out lifestyle choices, but the lifestyle of popular bands/musicians is also countrywide or worldwide tours. It doesn't look like an easy life, so I wonder to what extend those excesses are related to being on the road maybe half of the year? I think this means no true social life for extended periods of time; not having people you value telling you that you're past that red line is one less safety.
Also, artists in general are a peculiar profile I think. It's not only famous singers that take drugs, commit suicide etc. One can easily find many writers and painters, some of them even only became famous postmortem.
It's somewhat interesting, but the authors' conclusions are a bit odd given their data.
They acknowledge that fame is potentially confounding:
Risk factors (impulsivity, substance use, etc.) -> Fame achievement |
Risk factors -> Early mortality
The authors also appear to conclude that fame is semi-causal of the mortality risk. If, taking a causal statistical approach, the authors conditioned on the collider:
Risk factors (substance use, personality traits, mental health vulnerabilities) -> Becoming/staying a professional singer <- Talent/drive toward fame
I do applaud them for preregistering the study, but I think this paper needed a little more rigor in peer review.
This particular design more or less can't tell us whether fame in and of itself is a risk factor. We'd need to look at a cross-section of professions, not just musicians. Do marquee leading actors die younger than character actors? Do national politicians die younger than local? Do best-selling authors die younger than struggling authors who publish but never sell anything? Do professional athletes in popular sports die younger than athletes in less popular sports?
Mechanistically, it seems pretty obvious that fame can't cause a physical health outcome. I think the authors know this and they mention that it isn't really fame per se; it's the anxiety caused by public scrutiny and high expectations, often coped with by using illegal drugs to self-medicate.
That isn't a worthless finding, but what are we supposed to take from this? I would imagine drug-using hard-partying rock stars know their lifestyle in unhealthy and dangerous, just as I am fairly certain you'd be able to produce a retrospective study showing wingsuit divers die younger than big wall rock climbers, and big wall rock climbers die younger than trail runners. Anyone doing these things knows the risk and does it anyway. It seems the effect they found is famous musicians die 4.6 years younger on average than comparable unknown musicians. If you told me I could be a rock star but I'd die at 81 instead of 85, I think I'm probably taking that. Of course, we know it doesn't actually work that way, more that a few die in their 20s, far more in their 40s and 50s, and anyone making it past that is probably dying about the same time as anyone else, but whatever the risk is, if that's the life you want, so be it.
The 27 Club is an informal list consisting mostly of popular musicians who died at age 27. Although the claim of a "statistical spike" for the death of musicians at that age has been refuted by scientific research, it remains a common cultural conception that the phenomenon exists, with many celebrities who die at 27 noted for their high-risk lifestyles.
From the graph in the paper, it seems that once you make it till 60, the mortality rate is actually lower if you're famous. I'm guessing it's because the ones with an extreme lifestyle don't make it that far, and the famous singers have more money to spend on healthcare than the less famous singers.
Jimmi Hendrix, Janice Joplin, Jim Morrison, Kurt Kobain, and Bon Scott would all fit the profile. All died young of substance abuse. But then we have Keith Richards which no one can explain.
My childhood best friend is a touring a member of a relatively famous singer's band. I remember a discussion I had with him once about how soul-sucking it is to constantly be on the road. He was telling me how easy it is to just fall into a bad routine. He said you'd play a banger of a show one night, go back to the bus, have a few drinks and maybe some other substances. The next night, you play another banger, go back to the bus, have a few drinks, etc.. Next think you know, this is your everyday life.
He was also telling me about how constantly being on tour comes with this unsettling feeling. You travel to a city, play a show, go to sleep, and might wake up in a completely different city, state, or country. He told me that he started to develop some kind of latent anxiety due to the bombardment of new places and experiences causing a lack of consistency and familiarity in which one often anchors their lives to.
Confounding factors for singers: heavy drug use, lower educational background leading to poor habits, various addictions - not sure if being "famous" itself is the right lens to look at it for proper insights here related to mortality.
I know its kind of a conspiracy theory, and surely lifestyle dominates this statistic. But there is this plain fact that very famous artists actually generate more income for their label if they are actually dead. Makes you wonder.
There's a conspiracy theory about this, that rappers are killed for insurance fraud because people will believe it's just gang violence. I'm just sharing this as an anthropological curiosity.
27 is the age beyond which one can't pass for a teen icon anymore, and those who can't reinvent themselves in any other way see that they are facing the end.
I don't have time to read the article but did they do a control? I would be interested - and this speaks to my prior beliefs - about the life expectancy of people who tried to become famous.
In other words something like compare the life expectancy of people who don't play the lottery vs. people who win and then add in people who play as much as the winners but never win.
> Methods We used a retrospective matched case–control design in a preregistered study to compare famous singers with matched less famous singers (total N=648) based on the matching criteria of gender, nationality, ethnicity, genre and solo/band status. We compared mortality risk using a Kaplan-Meier curve and used a Cox regression to test the effect of fame.
Whereas my intuition is that there are traits that help you become famous (competitiveness, savant syndrome, prioritization of success over happiness, etc.) that also raise your mortality risk.
The control point is comparing to less famous musicians. I’d assume many of which have similar personality traits and desire for fame. But when it doesn’t materialize, their personality traits arent causing them to die early.
The lifestyle of constantly partying, drugs, sex, little consequences, money, excess, etc. Versus the less famous musician who has to function like an adult, stresses over their mortgage, etc. Is sure to have a variance with respect to mortality.
Goes into a lot of the realities of the surreal lifestyle
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OW87nhKZ8A0
If you have personal problems, it will follow you no matter where you go or how much money you have. It’s attached to you.
I don't know how much truth there is to it, some musicians are famous for that, but touring is far from easy, musicians move a lot and have to give their best every time when they are on stage. Especially singers, as their body is their instrument, they can't really afford to be out of shape. I am sure that after big public events like concerts, the thing musicians really want is to get done with it and go to sleep, not party all night. There may be drugs involved, but I'd expect it to be more about enhancing performance than recreation.
And that would apply to all professional musicians, famous or not. For most, I'd say what is excessive is their job, not the life of partying famous people are said to have.
Maybe, although an alternative explanation would be that those musicians with the strongest traits are the ones that succeed, and that same strength of those traits also leads to early mortality.
I don’t know if I buy it myself as being a big contributing factor. The lifestyles of famous people are well known to be indulgent. So that seems like a more direct explanation. But anything is possible
[1] https://www.princeton.edu/~mjs3/salganik_dodds_watts06_full....
Three main differences that come to mind... - athletes repeat this annually (famous touring musicians might take a year or two off to record new material). - athletes likely live a healthier overall lifestyle because being extremely fit is part of the job. Plus the teams have embedded MDs and other health support staff (some musicians will, some won't). - athletes usually retire from their primary sport in their 30s, so only ~20 years of touring on the high end, where musicians can tour into their 50s or 60s (or beyond for a few).
1) It's in the title: "The Price of Fame" implies that there are downsides to becoming famous, rather than there are downsides to having traits that might make you famous.
2) While the abstract merely claims "associated with" (which is correlation not causation), the phrase "beyond occupational factors" implies that the authors felt they removed important non-causal factors, hinting at likely causal relationship.
And yes, any causality implications are completely unfounded, and so this paper is of low quality.
The road is littered with smashed guitars.
Also, artists in general are a peculiar profile I think. It's not only famous singers that take drugs, commit suicide etc. One can easily find many writers and painters, some of them even only became famous postmortem.
They acknowledge that fame is potentially confounding: Risk factors (impulsivity, substance use, etc.) -> Fame achievement | Risk factors -> Early mortality
The authors also appear to conclude that fame is semi-causal of the mortality risk. If, taking a causal statistical approach, the authors conditioned on the collider:
Risk factors (substance use, personality traits, mental health vulnerabilities) -> Becoming/staying a professional singer <- Talent/drive toward fame
I do applaud them for preregistering the study, but I think this paper needed a little more rigor in peer review.
Mechanistically, it seems pretty obvious that fame can't cause a physical health outcome. I think the authors know this and they mention that it isn't really fame per se; it's the anxiety caused by public scrutiny and high expectations, often coped with by using illegal drugs to self-medicate.
That isn't a worthless finding, but what are we supposed to take from this? I would imagine drug-using hard-partying rock stars know their lifestyle in unhealthy and dangerous, just as I am fairly certain you'd be able to produce a retrospective study showing wingsuit divers die younger than big wall rock climbers, and big wall rock climbers die younger than trail runners. Anyone doing these things knows the risk and does it anyway. It seems the effect they found is famous musicians die 4.6 years younger on average than comparable unknown musicians. If you told me I could be a rock star but I'd die at 81 instead of 85, I think I'm probably taking that. Of course, we know it doesn't actually work that way, more that a few die in their 20s, far more in their 40s and 50s, and anyone making it past that is probably dying about the same time as anyone else, but whatever the risk is, if that's the life you want, so be it.
I prefer this sort of story to a scientific study!
And the people who make it a long time have probably learned how to push back against agents pushing them to work too much.
I keep thinking about Willie Nelson.
Keith Richards and Steven Tyler would like a word. :)
(aside, and with good humor: it's interesting that all but one of the dead folks names are misspelled, and it's the least famous of the lot! :)
He was also telling me about how constantly being on tour comes with this unsettling feeling. You travel to a city, play a show, go to sleep, and might wake up in a completely different city, state, or country. He told me that he started to develop some kind of latent anxiety due to the bombardment of new places and experiences causing a lack of consistency and familiarity in which one often anchors their lives to.
In other words something like compare the life expectancy of people who don't play the lottery vs. people who win and then add in people who play as much as the winners but never win.
> Methods We used a retrospective matched case–control design in a preregistered study to compare famous singers with matched less famous singers (total N=648) based on the matching criteria of gender, nationality, ethnicity, genre and solo/band status. We compared mortality risk using a Kaplan-Meier curve and used a Cox regression to test the effect of fame.