A new academic study has suggested that deaths from car crashes are higher on days when major albums are released.
A paper was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research last month under the title ‘Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities’, with research being conducted by a team from Harvard Medical School.
They analysed data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, which tracks fatal injuries suffered in motor vehicle traffic crashes in the US, as well as Spotify streaming data, and focused on the days of release of the 10 most streamed albums in a single day between 2017 and 2022.
The analysis found that on the days of major album releases, smartphone usage in general surged by 40 per cent, and on those days, traffic fatalities in the US also increased by 15 per cent.
The researchers acknowledged that there are other potential factors at play – for example, albums are commonly released on Fridays, when people are more likely to socialise – but they did account for holidays and intense travel periods in their analysis.
Despite Friday being a day when many people go out, they found that “fatalities remained elevated on album release Fridays compared with the Fridays before and after”.
They also found that fatalities were more common among sober drivers and on days with good weather, which they say suggests drivers may be more likely to allow themselves to be distracted when they think conditions are safer. Deaths were also higher among “single-occupant vehicles”, suggesting that passengers reduce the risk of accidents when they manage music streaming devices in place of drivers.
The most streamed album on a single day during the period of observation – 2017 to 2022 – was Taylor Swift’s ‘Midnights’ in 2022, with 184million streams. Swift went on to shatter that record two years later with ‘The Tortured Poets Department’, which racked up 300million streams.
Swift had two other albums in the top 10, which also included records by Drake (three times), Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles and Kanye West.