Elvis Presley, Keith Moon, now Michael Jackson. Jimi Hendrix, Janis Joplin, Brian Jones, John Lennon, of course. That guy in the Pretenders, that other guy in the Pretenders, one of the blokes from Wings . . . erm, John Entwistle . . . oh yes, then Buddy Holly and Eddie Cochran and Gene Vincent. Anyway, you get the idea. Rock stars die young.

But is that really true? Yes, Michael Jackson is dead, but the rest of the Jackson 5 are still with us. Brian Jones is gone, but the rest of the Stones are out on tour most of the time. Mick Jagger will soon be on stage singing Gimme Sheltered Housing. Half of The Who may have died, but the other half didn’t die before they got old.

It is possible — isn’t it? — that the early death of rock stars is a myth caused by the availability heuristic. A heuristic is a mental shortcut that we use to make quick judgments. The availability heuristic is the way, in the absence of full information, in which we use vivid examples that are easy to hand and treat them as if they were representative. So without access to a full database tracking the health status of rock stars it is easiest to recall the number of famous dead stars. Easiest, but hardly scientific. After all, in any population there will be tragic young deaths. Who knows if the deaths we read about are just the number we would expect?

The answer is that a group of academics at the Centre for Public Health, at Liverpool John Moores University, knows. For they have taken the trouble to create a large database of rock stars. In 2000 an international poll of 200,000 fans, experts and critics identified the All-Time Top 1,000 albums. The academics then tracked down the birth dates and what they tactfully call the “survival status” of all the solo performers and group members with an album in this list.

They then compared this data with what are known as cohort life tables, which provide the historic survival expectation of a group of individuals with the same date of birth. The paper is a very careful, rather impressive, piece of work, and the authors did not neglect to use race-specific cohort tables.

It would have been fun (for me, at least; I think that the public health professionals would have viewed it differently) if all this work had resulted in the discovery that rock stars died at the normal rate. Instead it confirmed the folk wisdom that sex and drugs and rock’n’roll (mainly drugs, really) are bad for you.

The authors say: “From three to 25 years post fame, both North American and European pop stars experience significantly higher mortality (more than 1.7 times) than demographically matched populations in the USA and UK, respectively.”

In many ways their second finding is more interesting.

After 25 years of fame, relative mortality in European pop stars begins to return to population levels. But it doesn’t do so in North America. And there is also a big difference between stars reaching fame before 1960 and those reaching fame after that.

These differences suggest that while self-destructive behaviour might be connected to the creativity that brings forth rock music, there is certainly a large role played by a destructive social norm among stars. Or then again, as we consider opposite, perhaps there are simply a lot of undetected murders.

Why was Jackson embarking on a 50-date stint at the O2? He may have needed the money to keep Bubbles in peanuts, but surely he could have rounded up the old gang and made a record? Marie Connolly and Alan Krueger, of Princeton University, supply the answer in their paper Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music.

The paper is a comprehensive survey, but a key conclusion is this — rock musicians are going to move from being recording artists to becoming troubadors.

Most rock bands find that the advance from their record companies is quickly eaten up by recording costs and that their royalties from sales go on promotion. The record deal, in other words, involves setting up the band so that it gets an audience but doesn’t yield much hard cash.

The real money then comes from touring. This is becoming more and more the case as new technologies develop.

“Music itself is going to become like running water or electricity,” said David Bowie, advising his fellow musicians that “you’d better be prepared for doing a lot of touring because that’s really the only unique situation that’s going to be left”. Economists now call this the Bowie Theory.

daniel.finkelstein@thetimes.co.uk

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