Spotify slashes streams of hit song after suspicious activity on prediction market Kalshi
Spotify slashes streams of hit song after suspicious activity on prediction market Kalshi
Spotify has removed more than 500,000 registered streams from Malcolm Todd‘s Earrings, after the song’s rise to No. 1 on the platform’s daily US chart was tied to bets placed on the prediction market Kalshi.
Kalshi is a US prediction market, regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, on which users stake real money on future events – including which song will be the most-streamed on Spotify in the US in a given month.
This appears to create a troubling incentive: a trader holding a large enough position on a track hitting No. 1 could attempt to profit by buying artificial streams to push it there, with the potential winnings dwarfing the cost of the fake plays.
The surge in plays of Earrings was first reported by the Financial Times, which said streams of the track had climbed around 70% in a single day to reach No. 1 on Monday (June 29) for the first time.
Bloomberg reported that Spotify spotted and removed more than 500,000 artificial streams that it did not believe came from genuine listeners, citing a person familiar with the matter, with the track falling back to No. 4.
“All streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation,” Spotify said in a statement. “Spotify has best in class detection and mitigation practices for manipulated streams, and we don’t pay out associated royalties.”
There is no suggestion that Todd or his team was involved in the manipulation.
Spotify has also demanded both Kalshi and Polymarket remove its logo from their sites, in a drive to make clear that neither company has a partnership with the streaming service.
Kalshi‘s COO and co-founder, Luana Lopes Lara, told Billboard in late April that, at that point, trading on the platform’s music ‘contracts’ had already topped USD $400 million in 2026.
By the time the streams for Earrings were stripped, the inflated figures had already been used to settle a Kalshi market on the most-streamed Spotify song in the US in June – a ‘contract’ that had attracted around USD $3 million in trading, according to Bloomberg.
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