When big albums start streaming, traffic deaths surge | CNN

When Dr. Vishal Patel found himself scrolling through Spotify to find songs from a new Taylor Swift album in his car, he realized he had drifted out of his lane. It’s a situation many drivers find themselves in, searching for the perfect song to add to their queues, and the moment inspired Patel, a physician at Mass General Brigham and researcher at Harvard Medical School, to look into whether car crash fatalities increase when major artists release new albums. More than 35,000 people die in car crashes in the US each year, according to the US Department of Transportation, with millions injured. In 2022, there were 3,308 fatalities in crashes due to distracted driving. Patel’s new study, published Monday in the journal JAMA Network Open, found a 15% increase in traffic fatalities on the days major new albums are released, compared with the days immediately before and after. Distracted driving is “genuinely hard” to study, Patel said, as most of the research in the space comes from self-reporting drivers or driving simulators. The researchers found that when popular artists released albums, there would also be an increase in general phone usage, and one reason may be because