Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Flags Suspicious Malcolm Todd Numbers

Tuesday, Malcolm Todd — the Steve Lacy-esque alt-pop artist and brother to fellow rising star Audrey Hobert — was awarded his first #1 song on Spotify when "Earrings" topped the Global Daily singles chart with 4.165 million streams. However, after a Kalshi trader noticed something suspicious about the numbers, he brought up the matter with the streaming service, who confirmed fraud and deleted more than 500,000 of the song's streams, leaving it at #4.

The Kalshi trader, Caleb Davies, has been covered in outlets like Rolling Stone and The New York Times for his success with prediction markets. He told Wired that he analyzes Spotify data to place bets on music charts, and there was something obviously fishy when "Earrings" rose to the top. He noted that the song was so unlikely to top the chart that it wasn't even listed as a betting option on Kalshi's competitor, Polymarket. "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," Davies says.

Davies suspects someone is trying to manipulate Spotify using bots in order to win money on Kalshi. Although Spotify has confirmed the fraud, it has not provided any insight into whether Davies' theory is correct.

Spotify spokesperson Laura Batey told Wired, "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."

However, Kalshi had already paid out Malcolm Todd bettors based on the flawed data. "We're in touch with Spotify and are actively investigating this matter," a rep for Kalshi told Wired. At Spotify's request, Kalshi has removed Spotify's logo from its Spotify betting markets and deleted language suggesting Spotify had verified the chart results.

"Earrings" comes from Todd's 2024 album Sweet Boy, not Todd's newly released Do That Again. After the song saw a recent surge of popularity via TikTok, Columbia Records released it as a single to US pop radio on April 14.