Spotify is the one verifying this mess. Caleb Davies found out. He makes his living on prediction markets, mostly culture bets. An IT worker from Minneapolis, he has pulled in about $1.2 million so far. Most of that came from Kalshi, a platform for betting on real-world events.
Davies loves music charts.
He spends his mornings scraping Spotify data. Downloads, rankings, trends. He builds projections to pick winners. “Every single morning,” he tells WIRED, “I’m going in, downloading the data.”
But this summer changed. Something felt wrong. The data looked too clean, too fast, too fake. He started digging into the code, then the logs, then the outliers. By early this week, he had a theory.
It involved a song called “Earrings” by an artist named Malcolm Todd.
The track skyrocketed to number one. It had no right being there. The statistical probability of such a surge was roughly 1 in 78 trillion trillion. Davies posted the breakdown on X, calling it a bot-fueled scheme to game the prediction markets. He sent his evidence to Kalshi. Then to Polymarket. Finally, to Spotify.
Was anyone actually trying to manipulate the market for profit? Probably.
Spotify confirmed the foul play. They ran an investigation into the flags Davies provided and found artificial streaming. A spokesperson, Laura Batey, stated the obvious. All streaming services get hit by manipulation. They claim their detection is best-in-class, but in this case, the bots slipped through the net for long enough to cause damage.
The company stripped over 500,0 Some thousands of fake streams from the total.
“Earrings” fell from first place to fourth. It should have stayed in obscurity. But Kalshi had already locked the market. Traders who bet on the outlier victory got paid out.
“We’re in touch with Spotify and are active investigating this matter.”
Kalshi’s enforcement head initially pushed back against Davies. He suggested the spike might have had natural causes or that traders were just following Polymarket leads. That didn’t hold water. Polymarket didn’t even list Malcolm Todd as an option, according to their spokesperson Annabel Walsh.
Nobody made money on the fake streams at Polymarket, yet.
Who behind the curtain? We don’t know. Motivations are unclear. Malcolm Todd is just along for the ride, apparently innocent. Davies remains frustrated by the lack of transparency from the platforms, though Spotify did remove their logo from Kalshi’s market headers after being contacted.
The charts are corrected now. The money has changed hands.
Prediction markets move fast, much faster than fraud detection usually operates. For now, the question lingers: if the house wins, do they still call the ball?
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