In a world where people can bet on everything from sports and politics to reality TV show outcomes, it’s not that far-fetched to imagine someone trying to boost music streams to make some cash. That appears to have happened this week after Spotify removed more than 500,000 artificial streams from Malcolm Todd’s “Earrings,” which had briefly propelled the song to the No. 1 spot on the platform’s daily U.S. chart. Caleb Davies, a prominent prediction market trader who has made more than $1 million on Kalshi and Polymarket and closely follows music charts, immediately called out the song’s sudden jump as suspicious. “Malcolm Todd got first in what also appears to be blatant fraud, with a 70% increase in US streams in a day,” Davies posted on X on Tuesday. On July 1, he posted, “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.”
Spotify later removed the artificial streams, which are streams that do not reflect genuine user listening and instead use bots or scripts to boost play counts. The updated play counts and charts appeared on Wednesday, sending Todd’s song down to the fourth spot, according to Wired.
