Rihanna's smurfy new single is one of several music streaming markets you can trade on at prediction market Kalshi
"Work." "Diamonds." "Rude Boy." What do all these things have in common? They are all songs by the multi-hyphenate Rihanna. Besides releasing music, she also voices Smurfette in the latest Smurfs movie. For the film, she recorded a new song, "Friend of Mine." Of course, whenever the discussion revolves around Rihanna, there is loads of anticipation and speculation, which leads to prediction market platforms like Kalshi creating markets for traders to forecast her new song’s Spotify performance.
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Kalshi users can bet on the streaming performance of many top new songs and albums for a chance to win real money. Currently, besides "Friend of Mine," Kalshi has prediction markets related to streaming numbers for new songs by Joe Jonas, Morgan Wallen, Lato, Renee Rapp, and Kesha. You can also find Kalshi markets for which song will be the next to hit milestones like 100 million, 1 billion, and 3 billion Spotify streams.
To trade on how many streams are predicted for a particular song, you will see a few different options. For "Friend of Mine," you can pick from options like "More than 2 million" or "More than 3 million." You'll then choose "Yes" or "No" and purchase contracts, then wait to see if it reaches that benchmark by a certain date (May 23, in this case). If your prediction proves to be correct, you will receive a real-money payout.
If you live under a rock and don’t know the massively famous Rihanna, she is multi-talented and has spent most of the last several years as an entrepreneur. She leads the massively popular Fenty company, which includes luxury clothes, makeup, skincare, and hair care products. Rihanna has grown the company into the most popular celebrity beauty brand.
She was also an extremely popular singer before gaining the additional job title of business mogul. In her over two-decade career, Rihanna has garnered 34 Grammy nominations and nine wins. She has released music with other icons like Jay-Z, Eminem, and Paul McCartney, to name a few.
Rihanna's last album, "Anti," was released in 2016. She has since released a couple of songs for movie soundtracks and headlined the Super Bowl LVII halftime show in 2023. Due to her limited activity in music in the last almost decade, a new release creates a lot of buzz. This time, her return is thanks to the upcoming film "Smurfs."
The Smurfs are a Belgian comic franchise that began in 1958. Since then, the characters have been featured in TV series, movies, and video games.
In the 2010s, Sony Pictures Animation released two Smurfs films, and the third was canceled. The studio then decided to reboot the series with 2017’s "Smurfs: The Lost Village."
In 2022, Paramount Pictures announced that it would be creating a new Smurfs movie. This time, the movie would be a musical, and Rihanna would write original songs for it, produce it, and voice the iconic Smurfette.
The film will be released on July 18, 2025. "Friend of Mine," from the movie's soundtrack, was released on May 15, 2025.
On Kalshi, there is a market predicting the total Spotify streams of "Friend of Mine" in its first full week. As of Wednesday, May 21, the song had 3 million listens. But how can you know how well a song will perform?
There are multiple things you can look at. For instance, how well have the artist’s songs performed in the past? Rihanna’s last song, "Life Me Up," has over 400 million Spotify listens. Knowing she hasn’t released a song in so long, it’s easy to assume any new song would have more than a few million listens.
However, it’s essential to understand the context. "Smurfs" is an animated movie and likely has a much more niche audience than a song like "Life Me Up," which was part of the much more broadly popular "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever" soundtrack. Given this, the streaming numbers "Friend of Mine" won’t be extraordinary, but they also won’t be less than a million.
It’s also important to look at daily charts and streaming numbers to see how the new song performs. For example, in a single day recently, "Friend of Mine" had 421,000 streams. If the daily numbers trend down, the song would struggle to reach 4 million listens in the next day. Watching these numbers every day can help inform you of how the song is trending and help determine predictions.
While Rihanna's star power guarantees substantial interest, the song's association with an animated children's film limits its broader appeal compared to her previous soundtrack work for blockbuster films like "Black Panther: Wakanda Forever." Regardless, Rihanna’s star power is enough to bring 2-3 million Spotify streams, even if it is a "Smurfs" song.
Head to Kalshi to trade on Rihanna and other music predictions today!
