Spotify Confirms Streaming Fraud After Kalshi Trader Cries Foul
Key takeaways
- This summer, though, he’s become increasingly agitated about what he claims is an obvious, bot-fueled effort to manipulate Spotify-related markets.
- This week, the situation hit a boiling point when the song “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd surged to number one on a Spotify chart.
- Spotify confirmed to WIRED that it investigated suspected manipulation incidents Davies flagged, and found evidence of artificial streaming. “All streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation.
Why this matters: a development in AI with implications for how people work, create, and decide.
The Spotify logo is displayed on a computer screen photographed using a kaleidoscopic filter.Photo-Illustration: Nur Photo/Getty Images Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Comment Loader Save Story Save this story Top Kalshi trader Caleb Davies usually speaks to the press about how prediction markets help him rake in money. The Minneapolis-based IT worker estimates he’s made $1.2 million overall across different prediction platforms, with $414,000 in winnings from Kalshi’s culture markets alone. He especially enjoys wagering on music charts, because he carefully analyzes Spotify data to pick winners. “Every single morning, I’m going in, downloading the data, and updating my projections,” he tells WIRED.
This summer, though, he’s become increasingly agitated about what he claims is an obvious, bot-fueled effort to manipulate Spotify-related markets. He recently began compiling and publishing evidence for his theory, eventually becoming so convinced that he contacted Spotify, Kalshi, and Polymarket with his concerns.
This week, the situation hit a boiling point when the song “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd surged to number one on a Spotify chart. In a series of X posts, Davies outlined his suspected culprit: “botting,” or scammers who purchase bots to juice streaming numbers. Davies argued that prediction market traders were botting the charts to influence the outcome of related events contracts. Todd’s song was such an underdog that it wasn’t even listed as an option on 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 wrote.