Spotify Strips 500K Fake Streams from Malcolm Todd Song Amid Betting Market Manipulation

Spotify Strips 500K Fake Streams from Malcolm Todd Song Amid Betting Market Manipulation

A viral chart surge. A suspicious jackpot. And half a million streams that apparently never should have existed.

Spotify has stripped over 500,000 streams from Malcolm Todd's song "Earrings" after the track's sudden, statistically improbable climb to the top of the platform's US daily chart set off alarm bells not among music insiders, but among bettors.

The controversy traces back to Kalshi, a prediction market where users can wager real money on outcomes ranging from elections to, apparently, which songs will top the charts.

When "Earrings" rocketed to number one this week, it caught the attention of Caleb Davies, a trader who says he's pulled in roughly $1.2 million from prediction markets. Davies noticed something off. The jump, he argued, was too dramatic to be organic and he suspected a rival trader might have deployed bots to artificially inflate the song's play count and rig the betting odds in their favour.

Spotify took action and looked into it, according to the company, Davies was onto something.

"All streaming services face ever changing stream manipulation," said Spotify spokesperson Laura Batey, confirming that an investigation had uncovered artificial streaming activity tied to the flagged concerns. The company added that it has built-in detection systems specifically for this kind of fraud and, crucially, that manipulated streams don't generate royalty pay outs.

What Spotify stopped short of confirming, however, was why the streams were faked. The company hasn't linked the manipulation directly to an attempt to game Kalshi's betting markets, even though the timing lines up with Davies' suspicions.

The fallout was swift: once the artificial streams were stripped out, "Earrings" tumbled from the top spot all the way down to number four.

Meanwhile, rival platform Polymarket moved quickly to distance itself from the scandal, stating that Todd wasn't even listed as a betting option on its own Spotify related markets  meaning its users had nothing to gain from the manipulation. And to be clear: there's no evidence Todd or his team had any involvement in the fake streams. He appears to be an unwitting bystander in a scheme built entirely around other people's bets.

Ironically, "Earrings" had been enjoying a very real and organic resurgence. Originally released on Todd's 2024 mixtape Sweet Boy, the track found new life this year thanks to a TikTok revival, the kind of authentic viral moment the platform's own fraud detection is designed to protect.

This isn't an isolated case. Streaming fraud has become an increasingly hot-button issue in the music industry. Back in 2024, the FBI arrested musician Michael Smith over an audacious scheme involving AI-generated songs, which prosecutors say netted him roughly $10 million in fraudulent royalties. Smith later pleaded guilty, marking what officials called the first criminal case of its kind.

Spotify itself has faced legal heat too. Just last month, a federal judge dismissed a proposed class-action lawsuit accusing the platform of turning a blind eye to "billions" of fraudulent streams that allegedly padded the numbers for artists like Drake. Spotify has consistently denied profiting from fake plays, pointing to its fraud-detection infrastructure as proof it actively works to root out manipulation rather than benefit from it.

As betting markets increasingly intertwine with pop culture metrics, from chart positions to streaming numbers this incident raises a bigger question the industry hasn't fully answered yet: when real money is on the line for something as manipulable as a stream count, how long before someone tries to cheat the system?