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I have heard several times that 2016 had witnessed more artist deaths than previous years...

Is there an actual statistic about this or is this just a biased feeling that expanded in people's minds?

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According to the BBC statistics, they had run more obituaries than the years before (but only by around 30-40%). The artists that you might be referring to are the primary rock, blues, and oldies stars from the 1930s to the 1980s. Each year dozens of actors and artists die off from different reasons, but due to recent advancements in technology and social media, deaths are becoming more noticeable than before. The "golden age" of music in the late 1900s produced many artists, but they are slowly becoming old. It is because of media coverage and the "celebrity" bar becoming lower that people notice many celebrities are dying off. Read this article for more information: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/thinking-man/why-are-so-many-celebrities-dying-in-2016/

I hope this helps!

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Any time you lose an icon as big as David Bowie and an icon as big as Prince in the same year it's bound to be a statistical outlier by definition, just because there aren't that many living pop music artists as seminal, influential and iconoclastic as those two were, particularly not that were still creating new work.

Add on Maurice White, Merle Haggard, George Michael and Glenn Frey, any one of whom could have been the biggest name in music to pass on in a typical year, and you end up with a year not so much notable for the quantity of musical artists we lost, but for the collective wattage of their star power.

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