Road accidents increase on album release days

A new academic study, as reported by the British magazine NME, has concluded that road accident deaths are higher on release days of great albums. Last month the National Bureau of Economic Research published a paper titled ‘Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities’, conducted by a team at Harvard Medical School.

The researchers analyzed data from the Fatality Analysis Reporting System that tracks fatal injuries suffered in car crashes in the United States, as well as streaming data from Spotify, and focused on the release days of the ten most streamed albums on a single day between 2017 and 2022.

The analysis found that on days of major album releases, smartphone usage overall increased by 40%, and on those same days, traffic deaths in the United States also increased by 15%. The researchers acknowledged that there are other potential reasons: For example, albums are usually released on Fridays, when people are more likely to socialize. Holidays and busier travel periods were also taken into consideration in the analysis.

Despite Fridays being a day when many people go out, the research revealed that “deaths remained high on album release Fridays compared to the Fridays before and after.” They also found that deaths were more common among sober drivers and on good weather days, which they said suggests that drivers may be more likely to become distracted when they believe conditions are safer. Fatalities were also higher among “vehicles with only one person on board”, suggesting that passengers reduce the risk of accidents when operating music streaming devices instead of drivers.

The most listened to album on a single day during the observation period – from 2017 to 2022 – was “Midnights” (read the review here) by Taylor Swift released in 2022, with 184 million plays. Swift then broke that record two years later with “The Tortured Poets Department” (read the review here), which totaled 300 million plays.