Spotify asked Kalshi and Polymarket to remove its logo from their sites after users allegedly manipulated data on the streaming platform to cash out on prediction markets.
The music giant deleted half a million streams from Malcolm Todd’s song Earrings after discovering that the surge in listens coincided with suspicious wagers on Kalshi that the song would hit No. 1 on Spotify.
The episode compounds concerns that the prediction sites create avenues for manipulation, either through insider information or other tactics, like engineering the outcomes being bet on. French authorities investigated whether someone tampered with a weather device at Paris’ airport to win a Polymarket bet on the temperature.