In today’s world, teenagers rarely listen to the radio to hear the latest hits. Instead, they are on the website YouTube, listening to music and viewing popular music videos. Many popular videos do showcase substances like alcohol and drugs being used, which can influence these teenagers watching them. A study published in Journal of Epidemiology & Community Health looked at these effects more closely.

Researchers on the study, from the Division of Epidemiology & Public Health UK Center for Tobacco and Alcohol Studies at the University of Nottingham analyzed the exposure teenagers have to substance use in these highly viewed videos. Specifically, they looked 32 popular videos of the top 40 chart songs. The videos were analyzed in 10 second intervals for alcohol or substance use. Over the course of 7 months, one video left 203 million tobacco impressions to adolescents. If these numbers matched the other 31 music videos, all videos combined would leave over 4 billion impressions of substance abuse to adolescents and teens.

The researchers state that the video content is unregulated, but there are other ways to reduce the impact. One way would be to show anti-substance abuse messages before or after the videos.