What do Taylor Swift and Drake’s release days have to do with road deaths? More than you’d think

Who doesn’t like streaming music while driving? Unfortunately, new research suggests that when major albums drop and streaming spikes, traffic fatalities rise too.

A group of researchers affiliated with Harvard Medical School recently issued a working paper reporting an association between the release days of the most-streamed albums and an increase in US traffic fatalities. The authors say the pattern is consistent with smartphone-enabled driver distraction, including the use of in-vehicle phone-mirroring platforms.

"Modern smartphones present new threats to road safety beyond talking and texting, but the real-world effects are difficult to study," the researchers said in their explanation for performing the study. Fatal traffic accidents and release days for popular streaming albums, the team said, were chosen as an "exogenous event" that "may offer an opportunity to quasi-experimentally study the impact of distraction using observational data." 

The results were, if not surprising, then at least statistically significant. 

The ...