In late June, a song called “Earrings” by Malcolm Todd jumped from fourth to first place on Spotify’s US daily chart overnight — streams up nearly 70% in a single day. It turned out roughly 500,000 of those streams were fake, generated by bots. Someone had money riding on the song hitting No. 1 on Kalshi, a prediction market where real cash gets staked on real-world outcomes. Spotify pulled the fraudulent streams. Kalshi had already paid out the winning bets.
This is Goodhart’s Law in action: when a measure becomes a target, it stops being a good measure. Streaming counts were supposed to track what people actually chose to listen to. The moment a market let people bet real money on that number directly, the number itself became worth manipulating — and manipulating it was far cheaper than making people actually want the song.
Ten years earlier, in 2016, a bank ran into the identical trap in a completely different industry. Wells Fargo graded and paid employees based on how many new accounts they opened for customers. So employees opened millions of accounts customers never asked for, just to hit the number their bonus depended on. Same law, a different decade, a different business — the score and the goal had quietly become two different things, and everyone optimized for the score.
Anytime a number becomes the thing people get paid or judged on — a chart position, an account count, a quarterly earnings figure — the gap between what it’s supposed to measure and what it actually rewards is worth watching. The moment gaming the number gets cheaper than achieving the thing the number was meant to track, someone eventually will.
My take: The end justifies the means.
Not advice. Just how I see it.