What a shock: People are gaming the Spotify charts with prediction platforms
You’re probably aware by now that predictive gaming is everywhere. Sites like Polymarket and Kalshi allow people to bet on just about anything. The problem is that it’s often easy to fix the outcomes in someone’s favour via insider knowledge.
For example, there was a strange Polymarket weather bet in France. The winner emerged after some strange temperature spikes were detected, resulting in a payout of €25,000. It turns out that someone went up to an official Météo-France weather station and fired a hair dryer at the sensor, sending temperature up four degrees in 12 minutes, pushing it into a region where the Polymarket bet paid off.
The world is now a wonky casino.
Scam have now come to Spotify. People placing Kalshi bets on things like “Will artist X reach number one on Spotify’s global single chart?” Bettors (sorry, we’re supposed to call them “traders”) then manipulate streams via bots or purchased fake streams. Get it right and the payoff far outweighs the cost of fixing your “trade.”
Spotify noticed something weird with a chart-topping US hit called Malcolm Todd entitled “Earrings.” The company was forced to disqualify 500,000 streams attributed to the song. Why? The Financial Times says it happened after “discovering that the surge in streaming coincided with a jump in suspicious wagers on prediction market Kalshi.”
Who was behind this? Unknown. But Wired followed up and determined the chances of this happening randomly to earrings was “roughly 1 in 77 octillion.”
Kalshi says it’s investigating.
