What if you could use your knowledge of upcoming release schedules, quiet insider chats with artist teams, your skill at reading Chartmetric data – or anything else in the music business that you were pretty certain about – to place bets?
For instance, if you were very sure that Taylor Swift will get the most streams on Spotify in June, or you got wind that Zara Larsson will feature on the new Ariana Grande album, or even have banal personal information on artists (will Kanye West and Bianca Censori separate in 2026?) – would you stake money on it?
Depending on whether you were using non-public insider knowledge or not, this would be illegal: but the tantalising difference today is that, in the past, you couldn’t easily do this; and now you can.
Prediction market apps like Kalshi and Polymarket have quickly become huge businesses – and to the layperson, they look and feel like gambling apps. Now, you can stake your prediction money on anything– including events in the music industry.
In 2026, there’s a huge and growing market that has turned the data of the music industry – and the behaviour of its fans – into a febrile space of predictions. It’s a space where money goes in, and then more money might come back out if you are lucky, have made an astute prediction, or – in the case of users unconcerned by icky legalities – know something that others don’t.
$400m so far this year on music “predictions”
Billions are flowing through the apps – and the music prediction markets on Kalshi has already hit $400 million in 2026, Kalshi COO and co-founder Luana Lopes Lara revealed on the Billboard On The Record podcast.
Those companies will tell you quite firmly that they are not gambling apps. Technically, they are platforms more akin to trading peer-to-peer on a stock-like exchange, rather than users placing bets against one monolithic “house”, as in traditional gambling. Some are offshore, and others are regulated under the U.S. Commodity Futures Trading Commission (CFTC), not as gambling services. All are pitching the process as “prediction trading” rather than gambling.
This means that anyone can initiate a “prediction” and anyone else can “trade” money on it. (Platforms like Betfair, which operate in a similar way have been running for decades, are licensed and regulated in the UK by the UK Gambling Commission.)
Whether prediction markets *are* gambling depends a lot on your point of view. The nature of the predictions are generally longer-term than a lot of traditional sports betting – “will Drake release a record this year”? is a longer timeframe than “will Harry Kane score a penalty in the next 45 minutes?” – and this too is pitched as part of the anti-gambling logic.
Gambling researchers are already warning that the worst impacts of prediction markets are the same as those seen in gambling: addiction, financial devastation, and even suicide. One in five problem gamblers attempt to take their lives.
Can – or should – the music industry get involved?
We have often written over the last few years about how music could be financialised: fractional ownership of rights, companies creating buckets of song rights that can be traded on as sorta-ETFs, and so on. Those all feel like quite traditional financial devices in hindsight.
Being able to create a bespoke prediction situation (will Sam Smith release a new album this year?) for you and others to trade on feels like the modern social internet: fast-moving, more nimble than the industry on which it is predicting, hyper-financialised – and one, some people will spot, with wiggle room for quasi-anonymous abuse of the system.
The music industry loves the idea of growing the pie. But here is a nine-figure income stream that sits atop of the music business, and that the music industry – in many ways – can’t touch: any involvement could be seen as insider trading.
On the other hand, perhaps labels and rightsholders could license their data in innovative new ways, for people to slice and trade predictions on.
Could the tail wag the dog?
And there’s an effect-and-cause nature to prediction markets too: it’s obvious that if you have insider knowledge you can illegally game the system, but what if you spot that a huge humber of people are staking their money on your artist releasing their new album this year?
If it was slated for release in January 2027, and a lot of people wanted it to be released in 2026… would you move it a few weeks to come out in December 2026 instead? If many more are betting that your artist will do a collab with artist X rather than artist Y, should you set up that collab: because that’s what people think will happen (and thus, perhaps, want to happen)?
(This is possibly already happening in an illicit sense: see the part-amusing, part-worrying example of a man allegedly tampering with a temperature sensor with a hairdryer to make money.)
Lopes Lara confidently argues the company line in the Billboard podcast: Kalshi users are not gambling; insider trading is banned; and prediction markets are actually doing something impressive – gathering the biggest amount of human-sourced prediction data ever. Presented with a question of the addictive, gambling-like nature of prediction markets, Lopes brushes it away: “We don’t make money when our users lose.”
The music industry might wonder: is there a way that we can take a slice of the action, regardless of who wins or loses?
