Spotify has removed more than 500,000 streams from Malcolm Todd’s ‘Earrings’ after alleged links to suspicious bets on prediction market Kalshi.
According to a new report from WIRED, Kalshi traders have been accused of manipulating Spotify’s charts in order to make significant sums of money on the platform’s music prediction markets.
The publication reported that ‘Earrings’ unexpectedly jumped to Number One on Spotify’s daily US chart this week, prompting prominent Kalshi trader Caleb Davies to raise concerns over the sudden rise.
Davies, who has said he made an estimated $1.2million across prediction markets, claimed the jump was so unlikely that he believed rival traders may have used bots to boost the track’s streams.
Spotify later confirmed to WIRED that it had investigated suspected manipulation incidents flagged by Davies and found evidence of artificial streaming.
“All streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation,” Spotify spokesperson Laura Batey said. “Spotify has best-in-class detection and mitigation practices for manipulated streams, and we don’t pay out associated royalties.”
However, Spotify did not confirm that the artificial streaming was connected to an effort to manipulate Kalshi’s markets.
The streaming platform later adjusted its charts and removed over 500,000 artificial streams from ‘Earrings’, knocking the song from Number One to Number Four.
Polymarket, meanwhile, denied that its users could have profited from the incident, saying Malcolm Todd was not listed as an option on its Spotify market. There is also no suggestion that Todd or his team were involved in the artificial streaming.
‘Earrings’ originally appeared on Todd’s 2024 mixtape ‘Sweet Boy’, and has enjoyed renewed chart success this year following a resurgence on TikTok.
The incident comes amid increased scrutiny around streaming fraud. In 2024, musician Michael Smith was arrested by the FBI over an alleged streaming fraud scheme involving AI-generated songs, through which he was accused of collecting $10million.
Earlier this year, Smith pleaded guilty to defrauding music streamers out of millions using AI, in what prosecutors described as the first criminal case of its kind.
Elsewhere, a proposed class action lawsuit accusing Spotify of allowing “billions” of fraudulent streams to inflate the play counts of Drake and other artists was dismissed by a US federal judge last month.
Spotify has denied benefitting from fake streams, and says it uses fraud-detection systems to identify and remove artificial plays.