Which Pop Stars Kill the Most Motorists?
A new study finds about 20 extra people per day die in traffic accidents on those days that giant hit albums drop. But who are the most lethal singers?
Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny, Drake, Kanye West, and other big stars typically release their new albums to streaming services early on a Friday morning at at 12:00:01 AM.
Traffic fatalities have been almost 15% higher on the Fridays of the ten biggest albums of 2017-2022 than on comparable Fridays without hit album releases.
Here’s the abstract of new academic paper about how hit pop music albums arrive drenched in blood, although the authors try hard to make their research sound more boring than that.
Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities
Vishal R. Patel, Christopher M. Worsham, Michael Liu, and Anupam B. Jena
NBER Working Paper No. 34866
February 2026
ABSTRACT Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real world effects are difficult to study. One way to causally assess the impact of smartphones on road safety is to identify arbitrarily timed events during which smartphone-related distraction may exogenously increase – i.e., a situation that relies not on plausibly random variation in who uses smartphones while driving, but when smartphones are used. We investigated the impact of smartphones on road safety by examining traffic fatalities on days when smartphone use likely surges: the release of major music albums. Using event study analysis, we show that music streaming – an indicator for smartphone use, where streaming most often occurs – sharply increases, by nearly 40%, on dates of major music album releases, while U.S. traffic fatalities increase by nearly 15% on those same days. Mobile device use while driving is a known safety issue, but today’s smartphones present new and greater opportunities for driver distraction. Our study indicates how features of these phones may have important impacts on distracted driving and traffic fatalities.
What academic papers need right after The Abstract is The Concrete, in which we are immediately shown actual examples of what the authors are talking about.
Instead, on p. 19, we finally find the names of the ten hit albums:
Paywall here.
