There appears to be a correlation between spikes in fatal car crashes and days when major artists release new music, according to a new study.
In a working paper recently published by the National Bureau of Economic Research, a group of researchers associated with Harvard Medical School investigated “the impact of smartphones on road safety by examining traffic fatalities on days when smartphone use likely surges: the release of major music albums.”
Using data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and Spotify’s charts to track the top 10 most-streamed albums between 2017 and 2022, they found that on days major artists like Taylor Swift, Harry Styles and Kendrick Lamar released new albums, smartphone usage increased by 40 percent — and U.S. traffic fatalities increased by nearly 15 percent those same days.
Swift’s 2022 album Midnights topped the charts as the most-streamed album in a single day with 184,695,609 first-day streams, the data showed. She later shattered records with her following album, The Tortured Poets Department, which had over 300 million streams worldwide on its release day, and most recently The Life of a Showgirl, which was Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day during 2025.
The researchers noted that new music typically drops on Fridays — when people are most likely to go out and party and drink. They also accounted for holiday-adjacent and heavy-travel periods. Still, they discovered that “fatalities remained elevated on album release Fridays compared with the Fridays before and after.”
Interestingly, they found that traffic fatalities associated with album releases were more prevalent among sober drivers and not more pronounced during the nighttime, therefore suggesting against other possible sources of distraction, including drunk driving.
Researchers also saw that the numbers in fatal car wrecks associated with online streaming surged in better driving conditions. They suggested this is because drivers are more likely to turn on distracting, high-energy, fast-tempo music when the weather is better.
In a 2024 industry survey of listeners conducted by Infinite Dial, it was estimated that “55 percent of U.S. adults who were drivers or passengers of a car in the past month streamed online audio, with 16 percent using Apple CarPlay and 10 percent using Android Auto infotainment platforms to connect their phone to their car’s display.”
“At the same time, while managing music in the car is an activity drivers perceive as less risky in surveys, simply listening to music has been shown to create significant distraction in simulations,” researchers wrote.
They acknowledged that passengers can also be a source of distraction; however, the data showed that “traffic fatalities associated with surges in online streaming was significantly more pronounced among single-occupant vehicles.” In fact, they suggested that passengers can potentially reduce driver distraction related to streaming music use by helping manage streaming devices.
