Harvard ties album releases to 15% more road deaths - critical summary review

On the day a hugely anticipated album lands, tens of millions of people reach for their phones at the same moment, for the same reason. A study published on Monday in the medical journal JAMA Network Open reports that those same days show a relative increase of 15.1% in fatal traffic crashes in the United States, compared with similar days just before and after.

In absolute terms, the researchers counted an average of 121 traffic fatalities on non-release dates against 139 on release dates — roughly 18 additional deaths per release day. Across the ten albums examined, the authors write, the increase is "equivalent to approximately 182 fatalities in the US attributable to the release days of the 10 included albums."

For scale: more than 35,000 people die in car crashes in the United States every year, according to the US Department of Transportation, and in 2022 the government attributed 3,308 of those deaths to distracted driving. The study was covered this week by the Guardian, CNN and, in Brazil, Veja.

How Harvard measured what drivers never admit

The problem with studying distracted driving is that nobody owns up to it. "You can't randomise people into using their phones, and drivers rarely volunteer what they were doing in the seconds before a crash," said Vishal Patel, the study's first author, a physician at Mass General Brigham and researcher at Harvard Medical School. Most existing evidence, he told CNN, comes from drivers reporting on themselves or from driving simulators.

Album releases offered something closer to an experiment. "A day when smartphone use jumps nationally for reasons that have nothing to do with road conditions, weather or who happens to be driving," as Patel put it.

The team picked the ten albums from 2017 to 2022 with the highest number of Spotify streams in a single day — among them Midnights, by Taylor Swift, released on 21 October 2022; Scorpion, by Drake, on 29 June 2018; Harry's House, by Harry Styles, on 20 May 2022; Certified Lover Boy, also by Drake; and Un Verano Sin Ti, by Bad Bunny, plus records by Kendrick Lamar and Kanye West.

They then crossed those dates with the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, or FARS, the US federal census of every fatal crash on public roads, maintained by the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration. For each release, they compared the fatality count on the day itself with the ten days before and the ten days after, adjusting for the day of the week, federal holidays and time of year.

One check underpins the whole design: streaming volume for the top 200 songs in the United States was 43% higher on release dates than on the surrounding days. That figure says nothing about cars. "What it establishes is that these days are genuinely different in terms of national engagement with music, which is the premise the whole study rests on," Patel said. Spotify, the streaming service whose daily data the team used, is used by about 29% of US residents aged 12 and over.

The idea came from Patel's own car. Scrolling through Spotify looking for songs from a new Taylor Swift album, he realised he had drifted out of his lane. "I already knew the FARS database well," he told CNN. "There's a long tradition of using it to ask whether crashes spike on Super Bowl Sunday or Tax Day. 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."

Not the listening — the looking for it

The study's hypothesis is not that music is dangerous. It is that reaching a brand-new album is a search task, not a button press.

"You unlock the phone, open the app, find the release, read down a tracklist, tap the right song. That's several seconds of looking at a screen," Patel said. Unfamiliar music, he added, also demands more attention, and research has suggested that listening to new, high-energy music measurably degrades driving performance. Pressing a preset radio button or starting a playlist assembled the night before requires none of that sequence.

Christopher Worsham, an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and a co-author, drew the line explicitly: "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."

That framing is why the finding travels beyond music. For years, said Despina Stavrinos, director of the Institute of Social Science Research at the University of Alabama, who was not involved in the research, the conversation about distracted driving was about texting and calls. Newer technology added 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?" she said in an email. Choosing a song only "seems simple": it requires a decision, an interaction with the screen and then a return of attention to the road.

Who the increase showed up among

The rise was not spread evenly. It was larger among younger drivers, male drivers, people driving alone, and people driving cars with a built-in infotainment platform — the integrated screen systems now standard in new vehicles. The researchers also looked at alcohol involvement, the number of occupants and the model year of the cars.

That internal pattern, Patel said, is what persuaded him the effect was not an artefact. "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."

What the study cannot show

FARS records deaths; it does not record what was on the screen. Patel said the data cannot confirm that any driver was using a phone at the moment of the crash, so what the paper establishes is an association between release dates and fatalities, not causation. Spotify is also not the only platform drivers use, and the study does not examine non-fatal crashes.

The mechanism remains open even to the authors. "We don't know for sure what the mechanism is here," said Anupam Jena, a professor at Harvard Medical School and co-author. "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?"

Ian Reagan, a senior research scientist at the Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, a US vehicle safety research organisation, who was not involved in the work, pointed to a gap in the controls: the analysis adjusts for federal holidays but not for others, such as Halloween. "If people, if states were celebrating Halloween that weekend as opposed to the weekend beforehand, that could account for things," he said.

Patel's stated goal is not to get anyone to drive in silence. "It's that these days are predictable," he said.

What to do with this information

The practical instruction from the authors is narrow and cheap: set the music up before the car moves. "Pick the album, hit play, put the phone down," Patel said. Worsham's version: "Queue up your music before you put the car in drive, and let it play until you can safely change it." If a launch you have been waiting for happens to fall on the day of a long drive, download it or build the queue while parked — the risky part, per the study, is the search, not the sound.

Patel also suggested handing the phone to whoever is in the passenger seat, precisely because the increase "showed up almost entirely among drivers who were alone." Stephanie Payne, a psychology professor at Texas A&M University who was not involved in the study, listed the same options plus turning the phone off, putting it in a bag out of reach, or switching on do-not-disturb mode. Notifications, she said, "are really hard to ignore."

Two things are worth following from here. Patel proposed that streaming services add a safety line when they promote a big release — "a line about setting your music up before you drive would cost them nothing" — so whether Spotify, Apple Music or carmakers do anything of the sort at the next major launch is a concrete, checkable outcome. And the wider point Stavrinos raised applies to every app that makes you hunt on a screen: maps, messages, social feeds. The question, she said, "is whether the technology is competing with the attentional resources needed to safely operate the vehicle."