Spotify pulled 500,000 streams off a No. 1 song after a $3 million bet had already paid out

Spotify removed more than 500,000 streams from Malcolm Todd's "Earrings" after the song's first trip to No. 1 on the platform's daily US chart turned out to be inflated. The song is back at No. 4. The money that rode on it is not coming back.

Here is the sequence. "Earrings" had been parked in the top five of Spotify's US daily chart for weeks. Between Sunday June 28 and Monday June 29, its streams jumped roughly 70% in a single day and it hit No. 1 for the first time, a rise the Financial Times reported first. Spotify then found streams it did not believe came from real listeners and took them off the count, per Bloomberg, which put the number above half a million. The track fell back to fourth.

By then, the fake numbers had already done their job somewhere else. Kalshi, the prediction market regulated by the Commodity Futures Trading Commission, runs contracts on which song will be the most streamed on Spotify in the US in a given month. The June contract had drawn around $3 million in trading, according to Bloomberg, and Kalshi settled it and paid out on the inflated figures before the manipulation was confirmed.

The incentive is the story

Strip away the branding and the structure is plain. If you hold a big enough position on a track finishing the month at No. 1, buying fake streams to push it there can cost less than the payout. Streaming fraud has always been a royalty scam, worth fractions of a cent per play. Attach a chart to a betting market and the same fake plays become a lever on a much larger pot.

There is no suggestion Todd or his team had anything to do with it. His track came off the 2024 project "Sweet Boy" and got a second life on TikTok before Columbia sent it to US pop radio on April 14. He is the guy whose song got used, not the guy using it.

The person who noticed was a Kalshi trader. He analyzes Spotify's streaming data to place bets on its charts, and he questioned how "Earrings" could have topped them, then flagged it to Spotify. Trader Caleb Davies has since accused Kalshi of settling the June market anyway, despite warnings that the jump deserved a closer look. A Kalshi spokesperson said the company is "in touch with Spotify and are actively investigating this matter."

Spotify's own statement is a shrug with a lawyer behind it:

"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."

Technically true, and beside the point. The detection worked. It worked after Kalshi had already cut the checks.

Spotify wants its logo back

Spotify has now told both Kalshi and Polymarket to take its logo off their sites and to stop implying any partnership exists. A source at Spotify told The Hollywood Reporter the company will start "adding additional checks to the charts before they're published."

That is a small technical fix pointed at a bigger problem. Spotify's chart is no longer only a chart. It is a settlement oracle for markets Spotify does not run, does not audit, and earns nothing from. Kalshi lists dozens of contracts tied to Spotify and Billboard results. Kalshi COO and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara told Billboard in late April that trading on the platform's music contracts had already passed $400 million in 2026. That is a lot of real money resting on a number Spotify publishes as a marketing artifact.

Spotify has cleaned up its counts before. It pulled tracks uploaded through the AI music app Boomy in 2023 over artificial streaming, and in June a federal judge tossed a proposed class action claiming the service let billions of fraudulent streams pad the play counts of Drake and other artists. What is new is not that fake streams exist. It is who is buying them, and what they are worth now.