Spotify has removed roughly 500,000 streams from Malcolm Todd’s song “Earrings” after the track’s sudden rise to the top of its US daily chart lined up suspiciously well with a bet on the prediction market Kalshi.
The company has also asked Kalshi and Polymarket to remove its logo from their sites and make clear that neither platform has a partnership with Spotify.
The song had been hovering near the top of the chart for weeks, a fixture rather than a fresh hit, which is what made its final jump so odd.
Between Sunday and Monday, June 28 and 29, streams of “Earrings” climbed by nearly 70%, enough to push it from fourth to first place on Spotify’s US daily chart for the first time in the song’s run.
It has since settled at number three, after Spotify’s intervention knocked out the streams behind the spike, in a case that echoes recent worries about manipulated content slipping through Spotify’s charts undetected.
The trigger for scrutiny came from inside the betting market itself. Kalshi had listed a contract tied to which song would be the most streamed in the US during June, and it had attracted roughly $3 million in trading.
In the week before the jump, traders had priced only about a 2.5% chance that “Earrings” would finish June at number one, which meant anyone who bought that outcome cheaply and then watched it land stood to make around 20 times their stake.
A trader named Caleb Davies, who studies Spotify chart data to place his own wagers, flagged the anomaly first.
He calculated the Sunday-to-Monday jump as an 11.24 sigma event, putting the odds of it happening by chance at roughly one in 77 octillion, a number so far outside normal variance that it reads less like a chart position and more like a fingerprint.
Spotify’s own investigation concluded that bots had generated a large share of the disputed plays.
There is no suggestion that Todd or his team had anything to do with the manipulation.
The financial incentive sat entirely on the trading side, with whoever inflated the streams standing to profit from a market that had priced the outcome as unlikely.
Kalshi had already paid out the bets settled using the flawed count before Spotify caught the problem.
Spotify said in a statement that “all streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation” and that it has “best in class detection and mitigation practices for manipulated streams,” adding that it does not pay out royalties tied to manipulated plays.
A source at the company told The Hollywood Reporter that Spotify would be adding additional checks to its charts before they publish. Kalshi, for its part, said it is “in touch with Spotify and actively investigating this matter.”
The episode lands as prediction markets have worked to embed themselves more deeply into entertainment coverage, a push that has drawn its own scrutiny since Polymarket disclosed a $3 million theft tied to a third-party vendor breach earlier this year.
Kalshi has struck content partnerships with CNN and Fox News, and Polymarket has partnered with the Golden Globes, deals that only sharpen the awkwardness of a music chart being gamed for a payout.
Both platforms have also faced regulatory pushback in Europe this year over their licensing status, and Kalshi separately dealt with a case involving a MrBeast editor accused of trading on inside knowledge of the creator’s videos.
Kalshi has said it introduced new integrity measures in June, including risk scoring for high-risk markets and expanded whistleblower tools, and reported opening more than 150 investigations and blocking over 100 suspected insider trades in the first quarter.
Whether those measures would have caught this scheme is untested, since the manipulation happened on Spotify’s platform rather than Kalshi’s own order book.
The problem Spotify is now grappling with is structural: once a chart position can be turned into a cash payout, anyone able to inflate a stream count has a reason to try.
