Rates of fatal car crashes are around 15% higher on major music album release days compared to the 10 days before and after the album drops, according to US research.

The study looked at the rates of car crash fatalities in the US around the release of the 10 albums with the highest single-day streaming numbers between 2017 and 2022, including Taylor Swift’s Midnights, Drake’s Certified Lover Boy, and Harry Styles’s Harry’s House, and found there were 18 extra deaths on the day of a major album release.

Whether people were ‘flooring it through the fences’, ‘steering an Aston Martin into a ditch’, or just distracted by all the diss tracks isn’t clear, but the researchers say that smartphone-enabled driver distraction is a likely contributor.