Correlation Between Album Releases and US Traffic Deaths Will Make You Rethink Playing Spotify in the Car
· Vice
If you’ve ever scrolled through Spotify one-handed with the other on the wheel because you just can’t drive ten minutes to the grocery store without playing Ariana Grande’s latest album, this one’s for you. A new study on distracted driving statistics has noted an increase in traffic deaths on days when major albums are released on streaming platforms.
At first glance, this hyper-specific study seems like correlation versus causation. How could album releases possibly cause fatal traffic accidents, you may ask. The albums themselves aren’t driving the increase. Instead, it’s the drivers who are distracted by Spotify on their phones.
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Dr. Vishal Patel’s study examined distracted driving related to smartphone use. The data was narrowed to ten major album release dates in the United States, corresponding to the most first-day streams on Spotify. These dates ranged from 2017 to 2022, tracking several albums by Taylor Swift and Drake, as well as Bad Bunny, Kendrick Lamar, Harry Styles, and Kanye West.
These are undoubtedly some of the biggest contemporary artists, and not just in the U.S. However, Dr. Patel focused on data from the states, specifically a ten-day window before and after the release dates. Within those five years, there were 233,809 traffic fatalities in the U.S.
Distracted Driving Has Increased Overall, Not Just On Album Release Days
Dr. Patel’s study found a 15% increase in fatal traffic accidents on major album release days. With an average of 120.8 deaths occurring on non-release days, the release days had an average of 139 car crash-related deaths. That’s a difference of 18.2 fatalities, on average.
Dr. Patel used the Fatality Analysis Reporting System (FARS) to collect data for his study. Ironically, the project drew on a real experience. While searching for the new Taylor Swift album on Spotify while driving, Dr. Patel briefly drifted out of his lane. Luckily, he didn’t become one of his own statistics. But without that incident, this pattern might have gone unnoticed.
As Dr. Patel explained to CNN, FARS is a federal database of every traffic death in the U.S. Researchers often use it to determine if accidents spike during major holidays or national events. Super Bowl Sunday, for example, 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,” said Dr. Patel.
Study Finds Solo Drivers Are More Likely to Get Into Distraction-Affected Crashes
Dr. Patel also noted an increase in distracted driving accidents involving solo drivers. Which makes sense even to a less data-oriented mind. Without a passenger, there’s no one to search Spotify for you, or answer that text, or search for the nearest gas station. The phone comes out, and the risk of a crash increases.
The reality of FARS data is that it can’t confirm which accidents were actually caused by distracted driving. But that’s where additional metrics can correlate with crash data. Reports from the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration noted that distracted driving due to cell phone use causes 6% of all crashes. Meanwhile, distracted driving in any form causes 29% of crashes.
In 2022, NHTSA reports claimed that 8% to 11% of all traffic fatalities were caused by distracted driving. But 2024 reports indicated that cell phone manipulation while driving has increased from 2.2% in 2015 to 4.5%. That may not seem like much. But smartphone telematics data reveals that cell phones were used in 52% of drives where an accident occurred. How many of those were soundtracked by Drake, we wonder?
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