Hey Ya! These are the most (and least) distracting songs to listen to while driving

A NEW study suggests that if you have songs such as Bad Guy by Billie Eilish in your roadtrip playlist you may just have a safer journey, but Hey Ya! by Outkast is apparently a one-way street to distraction.

A UK driving school chain, PassMeFast, recently did some intensive research into the songs that are most and least distracting to drivers. The company conducted an analysis of Spotify’s 20 most popular car playlists.

The song Hey Ya by Outkast was found to be the most dangerous song of them all, with a distraction score of 72.6%. It was followed by Mr Brightside by The Killers (69.6%) and Empire State of Mind by Jay-Z.

At the other end of the scale, PassMeFast also released a list of the 50 least distracting songs, which are also available as a playlist. Top of the pops here was Bad Guy by Billie Eilish, July by Noah Cyrus and Bruises by Lewis Capaldi.

How exactly was this research conducted. Here’s how the researchers explained it:

Using Spotify data, PassMeFast analysed the 20 most popular driving playlists (combining 1 485 songs) and scored them in terms of danceability, high energy and how emotionally charged they are.

Those with a high distraction percentage score are energetic, emotionally charged, but with low danceability. The last factor means it has an irregular beat or tempo.

The scores were then averaged together to create an overall distraction score for each song.

Using the Spotify API’s popularity score, only the songs with a popularity of 80+ were included to pull the top 50 results. This means only the mostplayed songs were included.

See the full list of 50 most and least distracting songs on the PassMeFast website. | IOL MOTORING