5 Reasons New-Album Day Might Be the Deadliest Day to Drive

A new album drops. You hear about it before you’ve even had your coffee. So you slide into the driver’s seat, grab your phone, and start hunting for that one song everyone’s raving about.

Here’s the catch: That 10-second search might be the most dangerous thing you do all day.

A study says the days major albums drop are measurably deadlier on the road. Not by a little. By a lot.

The research landed recently in JAMA Network Open, one of the most respected medical journals in the country. And the backstory is almost too on-the-nose.

Dr. Vishal Patel, a physician and researcher at Harvard Medical School, was driving one day while scrolling Spotify for a new Taylor Swift track his wife had texted him about. Then he drifted out of his lane.

That near-miss made him wonder: Does this happen to everybody? Turns out, it does.

1. The death toll jumps about 15%

Patel’s team pulled five years of federal crash data and matched it against Spotify’s biggest release days from 2017 to 2022. Think Taylor Swift’s “Midnights,” Drake’s “Certified Lover Boy,” Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti.”

On those release days, traffic deaths climbed about 15% compared with the days right before and after.

In plain numbers: Roughly 139 people died on a release day, versus about 121 on a normal one. That’s around 18 extra deaths — for one album.

2. It wasn’t the drunk drivers or the night owls

Here’s what convinced Patel the pattern was real. The extra deaths didn’t line up with release-party drinking at all.

The spike showed up mostly among sober drivers, not drunk ones. It happened during the day, not at night. And it hit people driving alone — nobody in the passenger seat to run the playlist.

If booze and late-night parties were the cause, you’d expect the exact opposite on all three counts.

3. Younger drivers took the hardest hit

The increase was steeper for younger drivers than older ones, the study found. That tracks. They stream more, and they’re glued to their phones more.

But don’t get comfortable if you’ve got a few decades on them. Fumbling for a song at 65 miles per hour doesn’t care how old you are.

If you’ve got a teen about to get behind the wheel, the stakes — and the costs — climb fast. Here are 10 ways to save when your teen starts driving.

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4. Your phone is the killer — not the music

Let’s be clear about what’s actually dangerous here. It isn’t listening to music while driving. People have done that safely for decades.

It’s the phone. On those release days, streaming jumped about 43%. All that extra tapping, scrolling, and searching happens somewhere — and often it’s behind the wheel.

The music itself isn’t drifting you into the next lane. Your lack of attention to the road is.

5. This fits a much bigger, uglier picture

Distracted driving already kills on a massive scale. More than 35,000 people die on U.S. roads every year, according to the U.S. Department of Transportation.

In 2022 alone, distracted driving was blamed for 3,308 deaths. And that’s almost certainly an undercount, since a dead driver can’t tell police what they were looking at.

This study just found one more trigger hiding in plain sight.

What you can actually do about it

You don’t have to swear off new music. You just have to move the fiddling to before the car is moving.

Pick your album. Hit play. Put the phone down. That’s the whole trick.

“Nobody is asking you to drive in silence,” said Patel, the study’s lead author. He’s right. Queue it up in the driveway and let it ride.

The next blockbuster is always around the corner. When it lands, the urge to search for it in traffic will be right there with it. Beat it — 10 seconds of prep beats a lifetime of regret.

And while you’re fixing your habits behind the wheel, it’s worth killing the money-wasting ones too.

There are other driving habits that are secretly ruining your car and draining your gas tank, and staying sharp on the road also helps you avoid a speeding ticket that can cost you nearly $2,000.