On Major Music Release Days, Stay Extra Vigilant While Driving. Car Crash Deaths Seem to Spike When Top Artists Drop New Albums

A new study found a correlation between big album release days and traffic fatalities. While the research can’t prove the new music caused the accidents, the work hints at a major distractor while driving

Sara Hashemi | Daily Correspondent

April 14, 2026

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You might want to be extra cautious while driving if a new Bad Bunny album just dropped. On major music release days in the past several years—when streaming on Spotify spiked by more than 40 percent—traffic fatalities also jumped up by about 15 percent, researchers report in a working paper published in February by the National Bureau of Economic Research.

While the findings, which have not been peer-reviewed, cannot prove that distractions by the newly released albums caused the increase in car accidents, they point to a potential hazard that streaming services and car manufacturers can address.

The study was inspired by an all too familiar—and risky—scene. Study co-author Vishal Patel was driving while pulling up a new song his wife had just texted him about, when he realized he was drifting out of his lane.  

“It hit me that a split second longer with my eyes off the road could have meant a serious accident,” Patel, a surgical resident at Brigham and Women’s Hospital and a clinical fellow at Harvard Medical School, says in a statement. “Then I thought, if millions of people are doing the same thing at the same time—on the day a big album drops—the cumulative risk on the road must be enormous.”

To see whether this was a broader trend, he and his colleagues identified ten albums with the highest number of streams on Spotify—the biggest music streaming service—in a single day from 2017 to 2022. Those included drops by artists such as Taylor Swift, Drake, Bad Bunny and Harry Styles, whose albums got between about 80 million and 185 million streams on their release days.

On the days those ten albums came out, Spotify streaming rose to an average of 123.3 million streams, the team found. For comparison, the service logged 86.1 million streams, on average, on the ten days before and after the major drops.  

However, traffic fatalities also spiked on those album release days. Using the Fatality Analysis Reporting System, a federal registry of deadly crashes in the United States, the researchers found an average of 139.1 deaths on those music drop days, after adjusting for other possible contributing factors, such as federal holidays. That’s an increase of 18 fatalities compared to the average of 120.9 traffic deaths on the ten days before and after the releases.

Looking at the characteristics of each accident revealed that they often happened on clear days, without weather to distract, and that the drivers were usually sober, young and in a single-occupied car.

Overall, the findings provide “fairly strong preliminary evidence” that streaming is linked to crash risk, Johnathon Ehsani, a road safety researcher at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health who was not involved in the work, tells Adeel Hassan at the New York Times.  

He also denounces the approximately 40,000 deaths from car crashes each year in the United States. “I think the bigger question here is: How is it even acceptable? Where 120 people dying every day is the cost of getting around in this country. That’s like a plane crash or two every week. And this is adding 18 deaths,” Ehsani says.

Patel suggests that Spotify and other streaming platforms, such as Apple Music, could more heavily push a notification to drive safely on days that big albums are coming out, per the Times.

Meanwhile, he plans to keep studying distracted driving. Vehicle technology has advanced in recent years, with cameras and sensors to alert drivers of potential dangers becoming more common. Artificial intelligence may also change the way we drive. It might cause even more distractions, but it could also take on some of those troublesome tasks, like drafting an email for the driver.

“People convince themselves they can multitask behind the wheel—scheduling calls, eating, putting on makeup,” Patel says in the statement. “Smartphones have dramatically expanded what’s possible to do while driving and, as cars become increasingly connected, the temptation to divide your attention is only going to grow.”

Sara Hashemi | Read More

Sara Hashemi is a science writer and fact-checker currently based in New York City. Her work has appeared in Sierra, The Body, Maisonneuve magazine and more.