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.
Kalshi had already paid out bettors on the market based on the flawed figures before the manipulation was confirmed.
“We’re in touch with Spotify and are actively investigating this matter,” a Kalshi spokesperson said.
Earrings had sat inside the top five of Spotify‘s daily US chart for weeks before the one-day spike.
The suspicious activity was reportedly flagged to Spotify by a Kalshi trader who analyzes the service’s streaming data to place bets on its charts, and who questioned how Earrings could have topped them.
Earrings originally appeared on Todd‘s 2024 mixtape Sweet Boy, and was released as a single to US pop radio on April 14 by Columbia Records, part of Sony Music, following a resurgence on TikTok.
A source at Spotify told The Hollywood Reporter that the company would begin “adding additional checks to the charts before they’re published.”
Spotify has taken similar action before, removing tracks uploaded via the AI music app Boomy in 2023 after detecting artificial streaming.
In June, a US federal judge dismissed a proposed class action that accused Spotify of allowing “billions” of fraudulent streams to inflate the play counts of Drake and other artists.
Kalshi currently lists dozens of ‘contracts’ tied to Spotify and Billboard chart results.Music Business Worldwide
