On Tuesday, Malcolm Todd — an alt‑pop artist known for his Steve Lacy‑style sound and brother of rising star Audrey Hobert — earned his first chart‑topping single on Spotify when “Earrings” reached the Global Daily singles chart with 4.165 million streams. Following a report from Kalshi trader Caleb Davies highlighting irregularities, Spotify conducted an internal review, confirmed instances of manipulated streaming data, and removed over 500,000 fraudulent plays, demoting the track to #4.
Caleb Davies, a Kalshi trader who has been featured in publications such as Rolling Stone and The New York Times for his work in prediction markets, explained to Wired that he scrutinizes Spotify streaming data to inform his wagers. He found the ascent of “Earrings” suspicious, noting that the song was not even offered as a betting option on Kalshi’s rival platform, Polymarket. “Analyzing the Sunday‑to‑Monday change data, the movement represented a 11.24‑sigma event—a probability of roughly one in 77 octillion under random conditions,” Davies remarked.
Davies believes that coordinated bot activity is being used to manipulate Spotify streams for financial gain on Kalshi. While Spotify has acknowledged the fraudulent activity, it has not disclosed whether it concurs with Davies’s hypothesis.
Spotify spokesperson Laura Batey told Wired that “All streaming platforms confront ever‑evolving attempts at stream manipulation. Spotify employs industry‑leading detection and mitigation strategies for fraudulent streams and does not distribute royalties tied to such activity.”
However, Kalshi had already disbursed payouts to Malcolm Todd’s bettors based on the inaccurate data. “We are in communication with Spotify and are conducting a thorough investigation,” a Kalshi representative told Wired. In response to Spotify’s request, Kalshi removed the company’s logo from its betting markets and excised wording that implied Spotify had officially validated the chart outcomes.
“‘Earrings’ is tracks from Todd’s 2024 album *Sweet Boy* — not from his newly released *Do That Again*. After the song experienced a surge in popularity on TikTok, Columbia Records issued it as a single to U.S. pop radio on April 14.
Kalshi did pay out the market based on fraudulent results right after sending me an email stating that there are many plausible reasons that Malcolm Todd’s timely surge was not due to artificial boosting. This is, of course, total bullshit. pic.twitter.com/vnbFCnfzJN
— Gaeten Dugas (@GaetenD) July 1, 2026
Yesterday I requested that Kalshi not pay out the Spotify market until they investigated it. Instead, they rushed to pay it out mere hours later. Today, Spotify removed the streams that gave Earrings the win yesterday. It should have been in 4th place, not 1st. pic.twitter.com/YTcc6TQrZL
— Gaeten Dugas (@GaetenD) July 1, 2026
