Is a big album dropping? You might want to watch the road

A study, published in February, has found that over the past several years, traffic fatalities in the United States increased by nearly 15% on the same days as the biggest album releases from artists such as Taylor Swift and Bad Bunny.

Researchers from Harvard Medical School, relying on driver behavior data, found there was more smartphone use, and a lot more distractions, on those days. Their findings, “Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities,” was published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

The researchers – Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham, Michael Liu and Anupam B. Jena – wrote that data suggests that mobile device use occurs in up to 52% of car trips that result in a crash, fatal or otherwise.

They were frustrated though by the lack of “real-world empirical evidence” of the impact on traffic fatalities of new distractions created by smartphones, especially streaming media. They tried to find an arbitrarily timed event that might cause more drivers to use their smartphones on certain days.

Music streaming surged by 40% on the days that the 10 most-streamed albums on Spotify – the most-used streaming service – were released in the years analyzed, 2017-22. Streaming music is one of the most popular uses of smartphones.

The researchers overlaid the most-streamed albums data with information about each fatal crash in the United States over the same time period. Adjusting for factors like federal holidays, the researchers found 139 traffic fatalities on album release days compared with 121 on all of the 10 days before and after.

This meant there was an increase of 18.2 fatalities per release day, totaling approximately 182 fatal crashes in the United States connected to the release days of the 10 albums, according to the study.

One of the albums dropped on a Sunday, but the other nine were on Fridays. In general, Fridays have the second-most traffic fatalities, behind Saturdays, according to the National Safety Council.

“I’d bet the physical interaction is the bigger danger, unlocking the phone, opening Spotify, scrolling through a new track list, tapping a specific song,” Patel said. “That’s eyes off the road and hands off the wheel.”

Patel and his co-authors also learned that fatalities were significantly higher in single-occupant vehicles.

“The simplest explanation is that a passenger can handle the phone,” Patel said. “It’s like a designated driver, but for the streaming.”

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.