Final note comes early for rockers

"And as the flames climbed high into the night

To light the sacrificial rite,

I saw Satan laughing with delight

The day the music died."

-- Don McLean, "American Pie"

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Since the dawn of rock 'n' roll, death has been a recurring theme. But for many young musicians, lyrics that dwell on mortality are prophetic.

A new study has found that rock and pop stars are more than twice as likely to die at a young age than the rest of the population -- and more than three times as likely to die within five years of becoming famous. The unhealthful behavior that leads to such untimely deaths harms more than musicians, the researchers said. It also sets a bad example for the millions of people who emulate them.

"Like any industry, the music industry should see the health of its participants as a priority as well as the wide effect it may have on consumers of its products," said Mark A. Bellis, the study's lead author and director of the Centre for Public Health at Liverpool John Moores University, in an interview conducted by e-mail. "It is, after all, a music industry, not a promotional tour for alcohol and drugs."

Bellis says his research team undertook the study, which claims to be the first to quantify the effect of pop music stars' live-fast-die-young culture, because the death rates in the pop industry have not been well studied and because pop stars have tremendous influence on others.

Although the researchers expected to find that musicians die younger -- after all, that is the common perception -- they were surprised to see how many of those deaths occurred near the peak of fame and that the death rate remained double that of the normal population even 25 years after the musicians became famous.

It is a rare example of a group of mostly wealthy people who do not have better health outcomes than people of lower socioeconomic status, he said.

The study, published last week in the Journal of Epidemiology and Community Health, was based on more than 1,050 North American and European musicians and singers who achieved fame between 1956 and 1999. All the musicians were featured in the "All-Time Top 1000 Albums," selected in 2000. They represented a range of genres, including rock, pop, punk, rap, R&B, electronica and new age.

For each pop star, the researchers calculated total years of survival and compared the numbers with their expected survival based on a general population of people similar in gender, nationality and ethnicity.