In a world where people can bet on everything from sports and politics to reality TV show outcomes, it’s not that far-fetched to imagine someone trying to boost music streams to make some cash.
That appears to have happened this week after Spotify removed more than 500,000 artificial streams from Malcolm Todd’s “Earrings,” which had briefly propelled the song to the No. 1 spot on the platform’s daily U.S. chart.
Caleb Davies, a prominent prediction market trader who has made more than $1 million on Kalshi and Polymarket and closely follows music charts, immediately called out the song’s sudden jump as suspicious.
“Malcolm Todd got first in what also appears to be blatant fraud, with a 70% increase in US streams in a day,” Davies posted on X on Tuesday.
On July 1, he posted, “Looking at the dataset of Sunday to Monday changes, it was a 11.24 sigma event, or a roughly 1 in 77 octillion chance of happening randomly.”
Spotify later removed the artificial streams, which are streams that do not reflect genuine user listening and instead use bots or scripts to boost play counts. The updated play counts and charts appeared on Wednesday, sending Todd’s song down to the fourth spot, according to Wired.
“All streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation,” a Spotify spokesperson told Gizmodo in an emailed statement. “Spotify has best in class detection and mitigation practices for manipulated streams, and we don’t pay out associated royalties.”
Spotify did not confirm whether the artificial streams were connected to prediction market betting. There is also no definitive evidence that Kalshi traders were responsible for the artificial boost.
Still, by the time Spotify updated its playcounts Kalshi had already paid out bets on which artists would have a No. 1 song in the U.S. in June.
Davies told Wired that when he contacted Kalshi about his concerns, the company’s head of enforcement, Robert DeNault, said only Spotify could confirm whether bots were used and suggested Kalshi traders may have simply been copying what traders on Polymarket were doing.
But Davies pointed out that this was impossible because Todd was not an option on Polymarket’s Spotify market for that chart.
Nonetheless, the incident has prompted Spotify to ask both Kalshi and Polymarket to remove its logo from their platforms and remove language that made it sound like they had a partnership. In a statement to Gizmodo on Friday, a Kalshi spokesperson said, “We’re in touch with Spotify and are actively investigating this matter.”
The case comes as prediction market platforms like Kalshi and Polymarket face growing scrutiny following high-profile cases of users making large profits on suspiciously timed trades tied to global conflicts.
Some lawmakers have introduced a bill that would ban trades on these platforms tied to outcomes that can be manipulated.
The bill, dubbed the Banning Event Trading on Sensitive Operations and Federal Functions Act, or BETS OFF Act, would ban several types of bets on prediction market platforms, including wagers on “government actions, terrorism, war, assassination, and events where an individual knows or controls the outcome.”
“What we have found is that in this administration, there are clearly individuals in the White House who are making money off of when the United States goes to war or not,” said Sen. Murphy in a video posted on X in March.
Beyond banning bets that could give government officials financial incentives to push for certain outcomes, the bill also targets wagers on events where insiders may know or control the outcome ahead of time. That could include bets on who performs at the Super Bowl halftime show, Oscar winners, and even the winners of reality TV shows like Survivor.
The bill goes after one of the core appeals of prediction markets. While both Kalshi and Polymarket ban insider trading, they also promote the idea that “experts” can use their knowledge to place better-informed bets, and in turn, improve the market’s accuracy.
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