Project information

• Category: Semester Project
• Lab: DLAB (Data Science Lab), EPFL
• Date: February 2020 - July 2020

Famous people and their deaths have always fascinated pop culture. Especially when they die at a young age, it creates a myth around them, with the most famous being the ‘27 club’, an age when a lot of talented musicians at the height of their fame have died. Our approach is to verify if there is enough statistical evidence that the 27 club exists. We also explore the effect that dying at a younger age has to a musician's reputation. We use data from Wikipedia, the largest encyclopedia ever built, to collect the information about the musicians and answerer these questions. We design an observational study to explore the effects of dying young in their long-term popularity. We find that statistically there is no evidence that the 27 club is real. However, we find evidence that musicians who died younger are more popular than musicians who died 40 and 60 years later than them.