Got designs on making it in the music industry? Word of advice – you may want to hold on to that X-Factor application until you’ve taken a look at the infographic below.
The simple line graph shows the average age of death for popular musicians by music genre and gender. On the surface, it’s not good news for budding hip hop moguls, rap stars or metal heads; these three categories have the lowest life expectancy of any category.
On closer inspection, however, you’ll notice that the genres are arranged from oldest to newest. More recent music types such as hip hop will feature many young performers who are alive and well and would therefore not have been included in the data, making these stats misrepresentative. Conversely, genres which became popular way back will have plenty of artists who died at a ripe old age dragging the average up.
So there you have it, kids – music isn’t just getting more dangerous. Well, maybe some of it is…a related study into cause of death by genre revealed that murder accounted for 51.5% of deaths in hip hop to date. Yikes.