Did Taylor Swift kill a bunch of people?

In a post entitled “FARCE: FARS Album Release Coincidence Examination,” Gaurav Sood writes:

Replication and extended analysis of Patel, Worsham, Liu & Jena (2026), “Smartphones, Online Music Streaming, and Traffic Fatalities,” NBER Working Paper 34866.

Key Findings

1. The Statistical Effect Is Real

Traffic fatalities are elevated on major album release days:

EstimatorEffect (Tier 1)SEt-statLocal (±10 day)*+23.0 deaths5.14.5Donut-global+16.2 deaths5.13.2Forecast+22.8 deaths4.94.6

. . .

2. But The Causal Story Doesn’t Hold Up

No dose-response relationship:

AlbumStreamsEffectTortured Poets (2024)313M-2 deathsHer Loss (2022)97M+63 deathsMidnights (2022)185M+5 deaths

. . .

Out-of-sample replication fails (2023-2024):

The paper analyzed 2017-2022 releases. We tested 7 major 2023-2024 albums as a true out-of-sample test:

AlbumStreamsEffectTortured Poets313M-2.1UTOPIA128M+10.5For All The Dogs109M-12.8Cowboy Carter76M-0.4Hit Me Hard and Soft73M+7.0SOS68M+9.4One Thing at a Time52M-1.5

Average effect: +1.4 deaths (vs. +22.8 for original sample). The biggest streaming day in Spotify history (Tortured Poets, 313M) shows a negative effect. The pattern found in 2017-2022 does not replicate forward.

Single outlier dominates: Her Loss accounts for 34% of the total Tier 1 effect.

3. Methodology Concerns

The ±10 day estimator uses post-treatment days as controls. The paper compares release-day fatalities to the average of the surrounding ±10 days—but this includes days after the release. Standard event studies use only pre-treatment periods. If the effect persists beyond day 0, the control mean is biased upward.

What The Paper Claims

Patel et al. (2026) find:

• 139.1 deaths on release days vs 120.9 on control days (+18.2 deaths, +15%)
• 123.3M streams on release days vs 86.1M control (+43%)
• Proposed mechanism: smartphone distraction from streaming while driving

What We Did

AnalysisDescriptionExtended dataFARS 2007-2024 (vs. 2017-2022)Forecast estimatorTrain model on non-release days, predict counterfactualDose-responseTest if more streams → more deathsExtended sampleAdded 2023-2024 albums (27 total vs. original 10)Placebo testsPre-trends, year permutation, window sensitivity

Results Summary

FindingResultInterpretationIn-sample effect+22.8 deaths/releaseStatistically significant (2017-2022)Out-of-sample+1.4 deaths/releaseEffect vanishes in 2023-2024Dose-responser = -0.18Wrong sign for causal storyHer Loss outlier34% of total effectResults driven by one albumTier 2 ratio0.80 (expected 0.50)Effect doesn’t scale with streams

And Matt Thatchet writes in with further thoughts:

I was wondering if you saw this paper. I first saw it written up in the New York Times, but it generated a fair number of articles in other outlets, too. The main claim is that the 10 biggest album releases (by Spotify streams) were associated with a 15% increase in fatal car crashes in the US.

I see the logic: higher streaming activity indicates more distracted driving, which causes more car crashes, but something feels flimsy to me. For one thing, it’s not clear to me that streaming music would actually be that distracting. If I wanted to listen to a new album I would put it on and then drive. There’s not much more to it, but maybe I’m underestimating the amount of other smartphone use that comes from this, like posting my reaction on social media.

The other part that sounds challenging is controlling for the day,.Most albums are released on Fridays which will have higher car crashes than other weekdays, but they control for this by comparing the 10 day periods before and after release date, which will include the same day of the week before and after the release date.

They include this list of albums and 5 of them were released within 10 days of another album in the list, which presumably makes the 10 day before and after control trickier. The other thing I wondered about, but they don’t seem to mention is whether the albums in the bottom half of the list have half the fatalities associated with the ones at the top, having half the streams. The average number of traffic fatalities per day is about 100, so maybe this would be too hard to tell.

Anyway I’m curious if you have time to hear your reaction to it. Like I said, the causal mechanism makes sense to me, but 15% is a huge increase and it just seems like controlling for day, season, holidays, etc. would make this almost impossible to be sure about.

I don’t have the energy to look into this myself.  Gaurav and Matt seem to have the right general approach, which is to look at the effect in the context of specific cases and to study variation.  In contrast, the common approach to quantitative research in published social science is to find some statistically significant relationship and hold onto it for dear life.

Or maybe I’m just saying this because I don’t want to believe that musicians are killing people.  I have a soft spot for pop stars, as compared to the culture heroes of today.