Matt Parker
speaker
278 appearances
8 recordings
1 series
first heard Oct 2010
last heard 8 Jul
Matt Parker’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.
Appearances
A guy called Mark Bellis at the Liverpool John Moores University took a cohort of musicians.
What he did... Were these superstars or just people who play music?
Well, this is it, because he wanted to have famous musicians, but a well-defined set.
And so he took the 1,000 top albums as voted in the year 2000, took out all the compilations and soundtracks, and then took all the artists, either in bands or solo, who appear.
And so he had 1,064 artists from the top 1,000 albums, and he analyzed how many of them had died.
And when he did this in the year 2005, 100 of them had died.
And his study was basically saying if this was a health risk, becoming a famous musician, what's the mortality rates afterwards?
And he found that if you are a famous musician, you've got a double chance of dying earlier than you should compared to being a normal person.
It basically turns out having lots of disposable income and drugs is not great for your health.
But I wanted to answer the 27 Club question.
So I got some of his data and re-crunched it.
And I found that when you become famous as a musician in the first five years of being famous, there's a 2.3% chance you will die.
And is that high?
I thought, well, I want to compare that.
to the normal population.
And the average age to become a famous musician is about 25.
And if you take a cohort of people who are 25 in the UK with the same gender split as musicians, there's only a 0.3% chance of dying in the next five years.
It's an order of magnitude.
Gosh, okay.
Actually, I double-checked.
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