Spotify Removes 500,000 Fake Streams From Track Amid Suspicious Kalshi Bets

^{Malcolm Todd Hobert is an American singer, songwriter, musician and record producer.}

Spotify, one of the world’s largest music streaming platforms, removed more than 500,000 streams from “Earrings,” a song by American artist Malcolm Todd, after a suspicious surge in its popularity. The Financial Times reported the move.

The track was released in 2024, but unexpectedly climbed Spotify’s daily US chart in late June.

Its streams jumped by almost 70% in a single day, pushing the song to No. 1.

At roughly the same time, interest rose on prediction market platform Kalshi in a contract betting on whether Malcolm Todd’s “Earrings” would top Spotify’s US chart by the end of June. A week earlier, that outcome had been priced at around 2.5%, meaning it was seen as highly unlikely.

After reviewing the activity, Spotify concluded that some of the streams may have been generated by bots.

The platform recalculated the data and removed more than half a million streams. As a result, the song was expected to fall from first to fourth place.

By that point, however, Kalshi had already paid out users who had bet on the song topping the chart.

According to the FT, those users may have received roughly 20 times their original stake.

The newspaper separately noted that there is no evidence that Malcolm Todd or his team were involved in any possible stream manipulation. Kalshi, for its part, said it is in contact with Spotify and is investigating the situation.

The case of “Earrings” highlights a new risk for prediction markets: contracts tied to external metrics can create incentives to manipulate those very metrics. If a payout depends on a song’s chart position, a poll result or another measurable event, market participants may try to influence not the forecast itself, but the underlying data source used to settle it.