More people die on the roads on big release days: a Harvard study finds a link with streaming

On the days the biggest albums of the year come out, more people die on American roads. Researchers at Harvard Medical School found a 15% rise in fatal crashes — and link it to streaming.

The work, published in JAMA Network Open, is reported by Engadget.

The method is simple: they took the ten albums with the highest number of streams within a single day and compared the release day with the ten days before and after. Releases by Taylor Swift and Drake are among the examples.

The explanation the authors offer

The mechanism the researchers point to is banal in its ordinariness: unfamiliar material makes a driver touch the screen more often. Skipping a track, finding the right song on a new album, checking a title — all of it is seconds with the eyes off the road.

The authors themselves warn against hasty conclusions: they cannot prove that smartphone use or even music streaming was directly responsible for most of these deaths. This is a correlation on a large sample, not a demonstrated cause.

What a listener can do with this

There is one practical conclusion in the study, and it is not about music: the queue should be built before the car moves. Radio, incidentally, is in a strong position here — it asks for no touch of the screen at all.

Something else is interesting too: the figure of plus 43% in streaming on release day shows how well the industry has learned to concentrate attention on a single point of the calendar. Nobody had counted the side effects of that concentration before — this is the first attempt.

As reported earlier by ONE//FM, streaming platforms are doing a lot of thinking about their own data this week — Apple Music has obliged labels to mark machine-made music.