Researchers took it upon themselves to explore the frequency with which the lyrics of popular music mention alcohol or drug use, only to arrive at a startling conclusion.

Researchers at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine studied the lyrics of hundreds of popular songs and found that one in three have lyrics referring to alcohol or drug use.

“We're learning that media affects a lot of different health behaviors,” assistant professor Dr. Brian Primack, who headed the study, told Reuters in an interview. “Tobacco in movies, for example, is now known to lead to smoking. We started realizing adolescents are exposed to two and a half hours a day of music. What's in the music?”

Primack and his colleagues set about to discover just what is in the music and looked at the lyrics of the top 279 songs on the Billboard charts in 2005. They found that 33 percent of these made references to substance use.

Rap music appeared to be suffused with such references, with nearly 80 percent of the rap songs analyzed mentioning substance use. Country music followed, with 37 percent of country music lyrics making such references.

Twenty percent of R&B/hip-hop songs contained lyrics alluding to alcohol or drug use, followed by 14 percent of rock songs and 9 percent of pop songs.

The researchers arrived at these figures by only taking into account lyrics that made specific references to use of alcohol and drug. They also named the substances which included alcohol, marijuana, cocaine, prescription drugs, inhalants, hallucinogens, and substances of unknown origin, reports Reuters.

“If someone says, 'I had one of those pills,' and you don't really know what that was, we call that non specific,” Primack explained in the interview.

The team presented its study at the American Public Health Association's Annual Meeting in Washington.

Rap music most frequently referred to alcohol, marijuana and non-specific use, while country music most commonly mentioned alcohol, the researchers said. They reported finding that most lyrical references to substance use were associated with partying, sex, violence and, or humor.

How about a study about music videos artists release?