Ongoing History Daily: How long does stardom last?

If you’re a musician and you hit it big, how long can you expect your stardom to last? This has been the subject of statistical study.

Today, nearly 75% of artists who have their first hit single on the Billboard Hot 100 are gone forever from the chart in less than a year. If we dig a little deeper, 27% of those songs come and go within a month. About 12% have singles spanning one to three years. Around 4% stretch things out to five years. There’s a slight bump for artists whose careers run six to ten years at 6%. Then it falls to just over 3% for a string of hit singles that run between 11 and 20 years.

Less than 1% of all artists can expect to have hit singles for more than 20 years.