By Jeff Sloan, Founder & CEO of FanLabel
Music data has become the centerpiece of a new financial market, and the numbers are growing by the day. Kalshi recently revealed that its music prediction markets jumped from roughly $70 million in trading in 2025 to over $400 million to date in 2026.
Beyond that, FanLabel’s internal market analysis estimates that through April 2026, year-to-date music and music-related contract volume across all prediction markets reached $823 million.
This robust activity has taken place with little to no strategic guidance, financial consideration for the use of NIL (Name Image Likeness), and data capture on the part of rightsholders. That is a mistake. Prediction markets are scaling rapidly, and the entities and people who create, own, and manage music rights need to help set the rules now.
The Opportunities
The upside extends far beyond contract trading volume invoking NIL. Music prediction markets could help even the data playing field between majors and indies. Event-contract prices create a real-time, market-implied probability for music outcomes, such as whether a particular song will reach the Top 10 of the Billboard Hot 100 chart or whether an album will cross a particular streaming threshold.
Independent labels and artists often lack the same analytics infrastructure as majors, so the market itself could provide concrete guidance they otherwise would not get.
Rightsholders can also use music prediction markets as risk-management tools, providing labels with guidance on release cycles where marketing spend and advances are tied to first-week or first-month performance. Markets can help publishers and catalog owners/buyers hedge against gaps between acquisition models and actual stream/chart performance, and accurately determine a song’s value for syncs and other licensed uses.
In addition, music prediction markets deepen fan engagement in ways that create commercial value for artists and rightsholders. Music superfans are already researching chart performance, streaming data, release clues, fandom signals, and artist lore. Prediction markets supercharge that engagement by harnessing it into a structured, data-driven activity with real outcomes attached.
Artists and rightsholders also have the opportunity to shape contracts in a way that provides multiple new sources of revenue. In addition to licenses for song samples, album artwork, NIL, and more, a healthy market for rightsholders could include settlement-data partnerships, brand/artist participation, and potentially a “toll” that rightsholders can charge based on trading volume.
+Read more: "Your Song Is the Starting Pistol, Not the Finish Line"
The Challenges
However, not every music outcome should become a tradable contract. It is imperative that music prediction markets be tied to objective data and designed with appropriate safeguards.
The easiest way to do this is to focus on outcomes that can be tied to third-party metrics, such as chart rankings and stream counts. Luminate administers both, and many digital service providers (DSPs) publish stream counts. These sources are publicly verifiable, already used for commercial and royalty calculations, and backed by anti-fraud incentives, making them a great foundation to govern results in music prediction markets.
In contrast, many music-related outcomes could be controlled by small groups of insiders, creating risk for manipulation or material non-public information. These include release timing, setlists, playlist confirmations, promotional-campaign details, and other decisions that could be known ahead of time by artists, managers, labels, promoters, DSPs, or chart-facing teams.
That does not mean the category is unworkable, but rather that the industry needs clear rules before these markets scale. Contracts tied to discretionary insider-controlled outcomes should either be avoided or subjected to much stricter review. Non-chart and non-stream markets should be limited to outcomes governed by independent, multi-party processes, such as major awards like the Grammys, where no single participant can determine the result.
For everything else, exchanges and music companies need restricted-person policies, blackout periods, information barriers, pre-listing consultation, settlement-source consent, and integrity monitoring.
Even objective-data contracts require careful design. Markets should define the reference universe clearly, use observation windows long enough to reduce the impact of short-term manipulation, set position limits that reflect the scale of the underlying music activity, and monitor both trading activity and the underlying chart or stream data for anomalies.
A Call for Coordination
The time has come for coordination between rightsholders, data vendors, and regulated exchanges to help solve these challenges. Rightsholders need a practical, licensed foundation similar to that of sports leagues, which increasingly use prediction markets to capture data revenue, drive fan engagement, and increase brand visibility. By negotiating similar terms, music rightsholders can ensure that the market does not harden without their input.
Verifiable, transparent data vendors are also needed so contracts are tied to metrics that are objective, durable, and difficult to manipulate. In addition to Luminate chart and streaming data and DSP-published streaming counts, key infrastructure partners for music prediction markets include companies like Tuned Global for licensed-audio infrastructure and Plaid or Coinflow Labs for payments and KYC (Know Your Customer) initiatives.
Exchanges should remain responsible for federally regulated listing, trading, clearing, surveillance, position limits, and anti-manipulation enforcement. However, the market needs a music-specific enabling layer between exchanges, rightsholders, data vendors, and infrastructure partners that can help identify appropriate metrics, secure settlement-source alignment, flag rights or insider-information concerns, and ensure that contracts are purpose-built to meet the existing needs of and capture the universe of new opportunities for rightsholders.
The prediction-market landscape is expanding quickly, with roughly 18 existing DCMs (Designated Contract Markets) and a similar number going through CFTC (Commodity Futures Trading Commission) approval. As more of them explore music and entertainment contracts, that coordination will be essential to creating standards that can travel across platforms.
+Read more: "AI Won’t Replace Your Music Career, But It Can Help Organize It."
The Road Ahead
FanLabel’s recent CFTC submission was one of the few comments focused specifically on music-related event contracts. That should concern the industry, as much of the prediction-market debate has been shaped by sports, gaming, crypto, state regulators, and consumer-protection advocates. Those voices matter, but music has its own economics, data sources, rights structures, and reputational risks.
It needs its own seat at the table.
Music prediction markets are still early enough to shape but not to ignore. The opportunity is now to engage and build a market that expands fan engagement, creates useful price signals and hedging tools, opens new revenue streams, and protects against manipulation before bad practices harden into industry norms.
Jeff Sloan is the Founder and CEO of FanLabel, whose ownership includes major record label groups, and the architect of the FanLabel ecosystem and its extensive patent estate. A serial entrepreneur with more than 30 years of experience and multiple successful exits – including Clarity Technologies, Rubicon Genomics, and Genego – Sloan has spent his career taking startups from concept through launch, growth, and exit.
