July 5, 2026 – Spotify has confirmed that its charts were artificially inflated by bot-driven streaming fraud, following a high-profile investigation launched by a top prediction market trader. The admission, made to WIRED late this week, marks the first time the platform has publicly acknowledged manipulation linked directly to gambling on its data.
The controversy erupted when Caleb Davies, a Minneapolis-based IT worker who has earned over $1.2 million from prediction markets, noticed an anomaly in Spotify’s daily chart. On the morning of June 29, the song “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd shot to number one—a statistical outlier Davies calculated as a “1 in 77 octillion chance” of occurring randomly. Davies, who had previously flagged suspicious activity to Spotify and the prediction platforms Kalshi and Polymarket, took to X to accuse traders of “botting”—using automated scripts to stream songs hundreds of thousands of times to influence betting outcomes.
“I saw the data. It wasn’t organic. It was a coordinated attack on the integrity of the market,” Davies said in an interview. His theory: traders were paying for bot networks to juice streams on underdog songs, then cashing in on contracts that paid out based on chart position.
Spotify confirmed to WIRED that it investigated the flagged incidents and found evidence of artificial streaming. “All streaming services face ever-changing stream manipulation. Spotify has best-in-class detection and mitigation practices for manipulated streams, and we don’t pay out associated royalties,” spokesperson Laura Batey stated. The company adjusted its charts on July 2, removing over 500,000 fake streams and dropping Todd’s song from first to fourth place.
However, the damage was already done. Kalshi had already resolved its related prediction market, awarding payouts to traders who bet on Todd’s song. The timing has raised serious questions about the vulnerability of prediction markets that rely on real-time streaming data. Davies, who has sworn off Spotify-linked markets until the issue is resolved, is now calling for regulatory oversight. “This isn’t just about a song. It’s about whether we can trust the data these platforms are feeding us,” he said.
Spotify declined to comment on whether the manipulation was specifically tied to prediction market schemes, leaving the door open for further investigation. As of this weekend, no charges have been filed, but the incident has sparked a broader debate about the intersection of streaming metrics and speculative gambling—a market now worth billions.