Spotify removes 500,000 streams from number one hit due to suspicious Kalshi bets
Spotify has removed 500,000 streams from a global number-one hit due to a suspicious bet on the online prediction market Kalshi.
The track in question is ‘Earrings’ from American singer-songwriter Malcolm Todd, which was first released in 2024, but jumped by almost 70 per cent in streams between June 27th and June 28th.
Per The Financial Times, Kalshi had previously offered a 2.5 per cent chance just the week before that Todd would secure a number one in the Spotify USA chart before the end of June.
After an investigation, Spotify subsequently removed the streams from ‘Earrings’ that they believed were artificially manufactured by bots.
Although the removal of the streams would have moved ‘Earrings’ down to fourth on the chart, by this point, Kalshi had already paid out to those who had successfully bet on the market. It’s estimated that traders would have made around 20 times their outlay.
In a statement to Wired, Spotify spokesperson Laura Batey shared, “All streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation. Spotify has best-in-class detection and mitigation practices for manipulated streams, and we don’t pay out associated royalties.”
Additionally, a spokesperson for Kalshi told the same publication “we’re in touch with Spotify and are actively investigating this matter”.
It was Kalshi trader Caleb Davies, who has a specialist knowledge of the music market, who first raised suspicions of bot manipulation. He explained to Wired, “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.”
There is no suggestion that Todd or his team were involved in the market manipulation of ‘Earrings’.
Spotify have since had its logo removed from Kalshi, and the site has also added a disclaimer to assert that the markets “have not been endorsed by Spotify“.
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