Traffic Deaths Rise 15% on Days Major Albums Are Released, Study Finds

Swifties, Beyhivers, and other fans of music who regularly drive, take heed. Research out today shows a link between the release of a major music album and an increased risk of fatal traffic collisions.

Scientists at Harvard Medical School and others looked at five years worth of traffic fatality data. Deadly car crashes noticeably rose on days when a major album hit the streaming waves compared to days right before and after the release, they found. The findings suggest that people can and should be more mindful about how they’re playing their favorite artist’s new songs while on the road, the authors say.

“Nobody is asking you to drive in silence. Just move the fiddling to before you’re moving—pick the album, hit play, put the phone down,” lead author Vishal Patel, a physician and researcher in the department of health care policy at Harvard, told Gizmodo.

Patel was actually partly inspired to look into this topic by his own personal near-miss experience. One day while driving, his wife (a singer herself) had texted him about the latest Taylor Swift album. As Patel was flipping through his Spotify to find the songs she recommended, he suddenly noticed that he had drifted out of his lane.

Though Patel escaped any harm, plenty of research has shown that the more we use our phones while driving, the greater the risk of a serious car accident. Some studies of simulated driving have also suggested that listening to unfamiliar, fast-tempo music can be especially distracting. It’s not exactly easy to observe the real-world effects of music on people’s driving, though.

“You can’t randomize people into using their phones behind the wheel, and drivers rarely admit what they were doing in the seconds before a crash,” Patal notes.

Instead, the team opted to scour through data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), which tracks all reported fatal car crashes in the country. Other research has leveraged FARS data to study how major holidays and widely shared events, such as Super Bowl Sunday, might influence the risk of deadly driving, so why not a big new album, the researchers figured.

“Album releases seemed like an obvious candidate nobody had tried,” Patel said.

In addition to FARS, the researchers analyzed data from Spotify, looking for the top 10 biggest album release days, streaming-wise, from 2017 to 2022. Number one, in case you’re wondering, was the October 21, 2022, release of Taylor Swift’s Midnights , which saw over 184,000,000 first-day streams. They looked at nationwide reported fatal car crashes on each of these release days and compared them to the 10 days before and after the release date.

As expected, total streams increased on these release days (about 43% relatively higher), as did fatal crashes. After adjusting for things like the day of the week or major holidays (known risk factors ), the occurrence of a fatal traffic collision increased by about 15% on release days relative to before and after.