It seems that when a major music artist releases a new album of certified bangers, one of those bangers is your car banging into a tree, or a light pole, or another car.
According to a recent working paper from researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School, first noticed by The Register, there is a statistically significant correlation between the release days of the world’s most-streamed albums and a spike in U.S. traffic fatalities.
Of course, please keep in mind that correlation does not equal causation.
The study used data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System and Spotify’s charts to track the top 10 most-streamed albums between 2017 and 2022. On days when major artists like Taylor Swift or Drake released new music, streaming volumes surged by nearly 40 percent. Simultaneously, traffic deaths jumped by 15 percent. While a 15 percent increase might sound “modest” in academic speak, in the real world, that’s a lot of people dying because they were swept up by the rhythm and plowed straight into a wall.
Could Friday Afternoon Beers Cause Car Crashes, Not New Music?
New album drops might be the culprit, but it could just as well be that new albums typically release on Fridays when people are partying and driving. The researchers accounted for that. They adjusted for holidays, day of the week bias, and even driver sobriety. After all that, the spike remained consistent among sober drivers and during both day and night hours, meaning that the culprit is a post-work beer or two to blow off some steam as people ease into the weekend as much as it is the distraction of the anticipated new album drop.
There might be one specific type of Friday new album listener in danger. A weird trend in the data shows the rise in fatalities was more pronounced in cars equipped with Apple CarPlay. Searchers suspect that in-car tech that mirrors your phone makes people more willing to fiddle with their playlists while barreling down the street.
We spent years worrying about texting and driving, but the new threat is our collective inability to stop rocking out in our cars. While the tech and automotive industries try to find a way to thread the needle between safety and providing the in-car entertainment we desire, the rest of us should probably be a little bit more proactive and just hold off on listening to that new Taylor Swift joint until we get home.
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