Spotify removed 500K+ streams of Malcolm Todd's Earrings after a 70% surge in 24 hours sent it to #1 on Spotify USA and coincided with suspicious Kalshi wagers
Financial TimesStephanie Stacey
Context & Ripple Effects
Spotify has faced stream-integrity issues before: in 2018, the growing value of influential playlists was linked to pay-for-play schemes, and in 2023 the service removed tens of thousands of Boomy-uploaded tracks amid suspected bot listening.
The current episode connects stream manipulation risk to a newer incentive: chart-linked prediction-market activity. That makes the integrity of platform rankings consequential not only for music discovery and royalties, but also for external markets that may price chart outcomes.
First-order effects
Spotify’s removal of more than 500,000 plays reverses a major portion of the track’s reported spike, affecting its chart standing and the data used to assess its performance.
The coincidence of unusual wagers with the surge puts both Spotify’s fraud controls and Kalshi’s market-surveillance processes under immediate scrutiny, even though the reported facts do not establish who caused the activity.
Second-order effects
Artists, labels, and playlist operators may face closer review when abrupt streaming changes determine prominent chart positions, raising the operational value of auditable listening data.
Prediction-market operators that list outcomes dependent on platform charts may need to account for the possibility that a platform can later remove activity and alter the underlying result.
Third-order effects
If chart outcomes increasingly support financial wagers, streaming platforms’ anti-fraud decisions become part of market infrastructure rather than a music-platform moderation issue alone.
The episode points toward greater pressure for clear rules on how charts are calculated, corrected, and finalized—particularly where external products depend on those rankings.
The trend: Streaming-chart integrity is becoming more economically important as platform rankings influence both music-market rewards and tradable external outcomes.
So allegedly people can bet on a song going #1, manipulate the streams, cash the bet, and the artist reputation takes a hit even tho they might not even know it's happening. Insane. Maybe not everything needs a betting market lol
Kalshi API data shows that in the Spotify market that was manipulated, traders who put money on the wrong side of Malcolm Todd collectively lost a total of $145,000 unwittingly betting against bot streams [image]
Purchasing bots to juice Spotify streams for a Kalshi payout on what song will be No. 1. “Spotify ultimately adjusted its charts to account for the discrepancy, culling over 500,000 artificial streams...The process was not immediate, though, and Kalshi had already resolved the
Yesterday I requested that Kalshi not pay out the Spotify market until they investigated it. Instead, they rushed to pay it out mere hours later. Today, Spotify removed the streams that gave Earrings the win yesterday. It should have been in 4th place, not 1st. [image]
Noteworthy nugget on top of this: People have raised concerns about Kalshi's Spotify markets since last year, and I explicitly asked Kalshi and Spotify about this in January. So the companies should not treat this as some new surprise.
Kalshi ran a $3M prediction market on Spotify's most-streamed song and bettors immediately responded by flooding it with 500k+ fake streams to rig the outcome. This is where the event contract matters. IMO, that contract was textbook “readily susceptible to manipulation” under