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Here is a new way to lose money you never knew existed: your song can climb Spotify's charts, get flagged for fraud, and lose half a million streams, and you might not have done a single thing wrong. In fact, someone gambling on your success may have done it to you.

That is roughly what happened to pop artist Malcolm Todd, and it should worry anyone who releases music, manages an artist, or runs a label. Because the motive behind this particular fraud is one your existing playbook was never built to catch.

Spotify removed more than 500,000 registered streams from Todd's song "Earrings" after its jump to No. 1 on the platform's daily US chart was tied to bets on the prediction market Kalshi, as Music Business Worldwide reported. (Consequence describes the song hitting No. 1 on Spotify's global top 50 chart rather than the daily US chart, so the exact chart in question is not settled across the reporting.) Streams of the track climbed around 70% in a single day to hit the top spot on Monday, June 29, for the first time, per the Financial Times. Once the fake plays came off, the song fell back to No. 4.

Let me spell out the mechanic, because it is the whole story. Kalshi is a US prediction market regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, and one of the things you can bet real money on is which song will be the most-streamed on Spotify in a given month. So a trader holding a big position on a track hitting No. 1 has a direct financial reason to buy artificial streams and shove it there. If the payout dwarfs the cost of the fake plays, the math works. That is not a bug in someone's scheme. That is the design.

This is the first confirmed case of that feedback loop, and it is the part the industry should sit with. Traditional stream fraud almost always traces back to the uploader: an artist juicing their own numbers, or organized outfits pumping AI slop through a catalogue of fake tracks. You catch them, you punish them, the incentive is internal to the music business.

Not here. There is no suggestion that Todd or his team was involved, and neither was his label, Columbia Records, part of Sony Music. "Earrings" first appeared on Todd's 2024 mixtape "Sweet Boy" and was pushed to US pop radio on April 14 after a TikTok resurgence, per Music Business Worldwide. The fraud came from outside the tent, from people who saw a legitimately rising song and decided to bet on it, then guarantee it.

How the scheme got caught (by a bettor, not by Spotify)

The tell is almost funny. The suspicious activity was flagged to Spotify by a Kalshi trader who studies the platform's streaming data to place bets. Caleb Davies, described by Wired as a trader who has earned an estimated $1.2 million on these platforms, calculated the odds of "Earrings" randomly topping the chart at "a roughly 1 in 77 octillion chance." He brought it to Spotify. Spotify investigated and confirmed the artificial streams, according to Consequence.

Sit with that. The person who spotted the manipulation was a competing gambler, not Spotify's fraud systems. Spotify says it has "best in class detection and mitigation practices for manipulated streams," and it does not pay royalties on flagged plays. But the initial catch came from a market participant with skin in the game, not from the DSP.

The money was already gone

Here is the detail that makes this a structural problem rather than a one-off. By the time Spotify stripped the streams, the inflated figures had already settled a Kalshi market on the most-streamed US song in June, a contract that drew around $3 million in trading, Bloomberg reported. Kalshi had already paid out bettors on the flawed data before the manipulation was confirmed.

So the fraud worked. The chart was corrected after the payout. The whole system moved faster than Spotify's ability to police it.

And the market is not small. Kalshi's COO and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara told Billboard in late April that trading on the platform's music contracts had already topped $400 million in 2026, including $110 million on a single question about Bad Bunny's Super Bowl set. Bigger pots mean bigger incentives to rig the underlying data.

What Spotify is actually doing about it

So far, the response is defensive. Spotify demanded that both Kalshi and Polymarket remove its logo from their sites to make clear there is no partnership, per Music Business Worldwide. A Spotify source told The Hollywood Reporter the company would start "adding additional checks to the charts before they're published." Kalshi said it is "in touch with Spotify and are actively investigating this matter."

None of that closes the loop. Spotify has stripped fraudulent streams before, from the AI music app, and a federal judge in June dismissed a proposed class action claiming Spotify allowed "billions" of fraudulent Drake streams, which the rapper has denied. But those fights were about who was uploading. This one is about who is gambling on the output, and the DSP has no jurisdiction over that.

The honest position: free public chart data is Spotify's product, and prediction markets have turned it into a settlement layer for real money. Spotify can add checks, clean streams, and protect Todd from being penalized under its own anti-manipulation rules, which it should. What it cannot do alone is stop people from betting on a number and then manufacturing that number.

The clean-up is easy. The structure is the problem. As long as there is more money in the wager than the fraud, the fraud is a rounding error, and the chart is just the scoreboard someone else decided to rig.

A Gambler Rigged Spotify's Charts to Win a Bet, and the Artist Paid For It

How the scheme got caught (by a bettor, not by Spotify)

The money was already gone

What Spotify is actually doing about it

Sources

The music business, decoded.