Problem: Some statistics on smoking from the CDC and US News:
In 2015, 68.0% of adult smokers (22.7 million) said that they wanted to quit smoking.
In 2018, 55.1% of adult smokers (21.5 million) said that they had made a quit attempt in the past year.
In 2018, 7.5% of adult smokers (2.9 million) successfully quit smoking in the past year.
Each year about 1.3 million smokers do quit. Since 1965, more than 40 percent of all adults who have ever smoked have quit.
Obviously, quitting smoking is quite difficult.
Solution: A friend recently sent this Reddit post to a group chat I’m part of. One of the comments on the post was quite interesting: it claimed that “Just remember this: The average nicotine craving lasts 3 minutes. Whenever you get that craving, just keep telling yourself it’s just three minutes. You can do it.” Our group chat joked “that’s even less than the length of a song!” which got me thinking, what if you could use music as a form of therapy to help people quit smoking or to quit other addictive drugs and substances?
First, I wanted to see if the fact about cravings was true. There were a few sources that seemed to corroborate this:
Verywell Mind published an article that was reviewed by Steven Gans, MD which claimed that: nicotine cravings are both physical and psychological and “If you pay close attention though, you'll notice that most cravings last only around three to five minutes. They tend to come off the blocks strongly and decrease gradually until they're finally gone. The best rule of thumb is to deal with cravings as they come, one by one.”
Similarly, Quit.com published an article which described how: “After quitting smoking, it takes between 3 and 4 days for nicotine to fully leave your body. That’s why the first few days after you quit smoking can be among the toughest: it’s when cravings first begin and are at their most intense. You can expect each craving to last about 10 to 20 minutes and then pass. Typically, cravings are strongest in people who smoked the longest. But luckily, these initial cravings are short-lived. While it will take your brain chemistry up to three months to return to normal, cravings usually begin to lessen in strength and frequency after the first week, and are usually gone completely in one to three months.”
The range of 3 minutes to 10 minutes seemed consistent across all sources. So what about music therapy? The results here are mixed:
Since there aren’t many sources, a group of researchers published an article in the National Center for Biotechnology Information to summarize the existing literature in the field: “we conducted a systematic search on published articles examining effects of music, MT and MBIs and found 34 quantitative and six qualitative studies… Beneficial effects of MT/ MBI on emotional and motivational outcomes, participation, locus of control, and perceived helpfulness were reported, but results were inconsistent across studies.”
There are also many articles about music, addiction, and rehab: you can find two of them here or here. They both describe how music is being used in the field by therapists to serve as a form of rehab.
This business would combine these facts (the length of cravings and varying success of music therapy) to create a product (mobile or web app) that uses music to treat addiction in a variety of cases. Given the fact that 21.5 million people just in the US attempt to stop smoking every year and 1.3 billion people smoke tobacco, this business could break into and break out in this market if it’s successful. If it works, there are also tangential markets to explore: cocaine, heroine, opioids, and other addictive drugs and substances.
Monetization: Charging fees for this type of therapy (perhaps $100 annually?)
Contributed by: Michael Bervell (Billion Dollar Startup Ideas)