(CNN) — When Dr. Vishal Patel found himself scrolling through Spotify to find songs from a new Taylor Swift album in his car, he realized he had drifted out of his lane.
It’s a situation many drivers find themselves in, searching for the perfect song to add to their queues, and the moment inspired Patel, a physician at Mass General Brigham and researcher at Harvard Medical School, to look into whether car crash fatalities increase when major artists release new albums.
More than 35,000 people die in car crashes in the US each year, according to the US Department of Transportation, with millions injured. In 2022, there were 3,308 fatalities in crashes due to distracted driving.
Patel’s new study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, found a 15% increase in traffic fatalities on the days major new albums are released, compared with the days immediately before and after.
New music, more phone usage
Distracted driving is “genuinely hard” to study, Patel said, as most of the research in the space comes from self-reporting drivers or driving simulators.
The researchers found that when popular artists released albums, there would also be an increase in general phone usage, and one reason may be because people are looking to stream the album on their phones. They identified the top 10 most streamed albums in a single day from 2017 to 2022, including “Midnights” by Taylor Swift, “Certified Lover Boy” by Drake and “Un Verano Sin Ti” by Bad Bunny and others by Harry Styles, Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West.
The study looked at a 10-day window before and after an album release to address concerns that there may have been more car crashes on specific days of the week. The researchers also examined fatal crashes, looking at drivers’ ages, alcohol involvement, the number of people in the car and the model year of cars, as newer cars may have more safety features that prevent distraction.
The study used the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, a nationwide census from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, to collect population-based data on fatal car crashes on public roads in the US, along with daily music streaming data from Spotify, a music streaming platform that is used by about 29% of US residents ages 12 and older.
“I already knew the FARS database well; it’s the federal registry of every fatal crash on US roads, and there’s a long tradition of using it to ask whether crashes spike on Super Bowl Sunday or Tax Day,” Patel said. “It struck me that nobody had looked at album releases, which are one of the few moments when tens of millions of people reach for their phones at the same time, for the same reason, for something other than texting.”
Increased fatalities on album release dates
There were about 18 more deaths on the release days of the albums in the study. On average, the study found that there were 121 car crash fatalities on non-album release dates, compared with 139 deaths on album release days. The number of deaths was larger for younger drivers than older drivers.
“What convinced me it was real was the pattern underneath it,” Patel said. “The increase showed up mostly among drivers who were alone in the car, it was more pronounced among sober drivers than among drivers who had been drinking, and it wasn’t concentrated at night. If this were really about release parties and alcohol, you’d expect the opposite on all three counts.”
The researchers acknowledged that there may also be external factors causing traffic fatalities on the same day an album releases and that Spotify is not the only music platform drivers may use.
Patel said FARS data can show car crash fatalities but cannot confirm that drivers were on their phones at the time of the crash.
“We don’t know for sure what the mechanism is here. Is it that the music is louder? Is it that it’s a new album, and people are just excited to hear it? Is it the mechanics of it all, meaning you’re fumbling around with your phone trying to download something?” said Dr. Anupam Jena, a professor at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the study.
The study also does not consider impacts of album releases on nonfatal crashes, but it does take into account federal holidays, which also have increased car crash fatalities.
Ian Reagan, a senior research scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety who was not involved with the study, said although researchers control for federal holidays, they do not take into account other holidays, like Halloween, that may increase car crash fatalities.
“If people, if states were celebrating Halloween that weekend as opposed to the weekend beforehand, that could account for things,” Reagan said.
Patel said the goal of the study isn’t to tell people to stop listening to music in the car
“It’s that these days are predictable,” Patel said.
Staying focused despite more distractions
For years, conversations about distracted driving have focused on texting and phone calls, said Dr. Despina Stavrinos, director at the Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Alabama. But newer technology has added more pathways for drivers to interact with their phones, including navigation, voice assistants and social media.
“This study broadens the conversation from, ‘Are people texting while driving?’ to a much more important question: How does continuous interaction with a digital ecosystem affect driving?” Stavrinos said in an email.
Something that “seems simple,” like choosing a song, requires drivers to make a decision, interact with their phones and then refocus on the road, said Stavrinos, who was not involved with the new research.
“It is whether the technology is competing with the attentional resources needed to safely operate the vehicle,” she said.
People can minimize distractions in their car by turning off their phones, putting them in a bag so they’re not accessible, turning on “do not disturb” mode or asking a passenger to interact with the phone if needed, said Stephanie Payne, a professor of psychology at Texas A&M University who was not involved with the new research.
“We rely on our phones for communication and information so much that it is difficult to go for extended periods of time without interacting with them. To complicate things further, notifications are really hard to ignore,” Payne said.
Dr. Christopher Worsham, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a co-author of the new study, said other studies look at the potential for music to be distracting, but it is unrealistic for many to drive in silence.
“Our study suggests that the dangerous part here is the fiddling with the phone or the infotainment system, not the listening. Changing the music on touch screens in the car, which is very common now, is different than pushing a button without taking your eyes off the road,” Worsham said. “Queue up your music before you put the car in drive, and let it play until you can safely change it.”
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