Spotify has removed roughly 500,000 streams from Malcolm Todd’s song “Earrings” after the track’s sudden rise to the top of its US daily chart lined up suspiciously well with a bet on the prediction market Kalshi.
The company has also asked Kalshi and Polymarket to remove its logo from their sites and make clear that neither platform has a partnership with Spotify.
The song had been hovering near the top of the chart for weeks, a fixture rather than a fresh hit, which is what made its final jump so odd.
Between Sunday and Monday, June 28 and 29, streams of “Earrings” climbed by nearly 70%, enough to push it from fourth to first place on Spotify’s US daily chart for the first time in the song’s run.
It has since settled at number three, after Spotify’s intervention knocked out the streams behind the spike, in a case that echoes recent worries about manipulated content slipping through Spotify’s charts undetected.
