A new study from Harvard has found a 15% increase in traffic deaths in the United States on days when a new, major album is released, as reported by Consequence. It was published in the medical journal JAMA Network Open and investigated the relationship between smartphone use and distracted driving.

​The study examined 10 albums with the most first-day streams in 2017 and 2022. These included albums from stars such as Taylor Swift, Drake, Kendrick Lamar, Bad Bunny, Harry Styles and Kanye West. It examined the nearly 234,000 traffic fatalities during that time frame, comparing the ten days before and after the album release to the release date. It found an average of 120.9 deaths on the surrounding days and an average of 139.1 deaths on the day the album dropped.

​Harvard Medical School researcher Dr. Vishal Patel told CNN that his inspiration for conducting the study came after he drifted out of his lane while scrolling Spotify to find Taylor Swift’s new album.

​He explained his reliance on the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS), a census collecting annual data on fatal traffic incidents. “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.”

​Patel went on to clarify that the 15% increase mainly showed up among people who were driving alone, sober drivers rather than drunk ones and there was no concentration at night. However, even with the correlational evidence, researchers noted that other factors could’ve caused the crashes and cited the study’s limitation of focusing only on Spotify stream numbers.