Polymarket rarely gets culture wrong when real money rides on the outcome. Right now, traders give Bad Bunny a 97 per cent shot at becoming Spotify’s most-streamed artist of 2025. Taylor Swift sits at a distant 3 per cent. The contract has already seen more than $1.8 million in volume, and “Yes” shares on Bad Bunny trade at 97 cents. That means a dollar bet returns just three cents profit if he wins. The market is basically shouting that it’s over.
Benito Antonio Martínez Ocasio exploded out of Puerto Rico in 2016 with “Diles” on SoundCloud. Two years later he was on Cardi B and Drake tracks. By 2020 he had seized Spotify’s global throne and held it for three straight years. He blends reggaeton, trap, and raw island storytelling. The formula works everywhere: Mexico City, Bogotá, Madrid, Los Angeles. His monthly listeners hover at 78 million. Gen Z drives 61 per cent of those plays.
Swift, by contrast, has owned the last two years. Her 2023 and 2024 Wrapped victories each topped 26 billion streams. The new album, The Life of a Showgirl, smashed the single-day album record in October 2025. The lead single, “The Fate of Ophelia”, set a fresh first-day song mark. She crossed 114 billion career streams this year alone. Seven of Spotify’s ten biggest single-day song records belong to her 2024–2025 releases.
So why is the market so sure she loses?
Because Bad Bunny never really left. His streams don’t spike and vanish; they stay sticky. Latin playlists rotate him daily. Europe and the US keep him in heavy rotation long after Swift’s album cycle cools. His Puerto Rico residency this year alone lifted US streams 7 per cent. Fans spun up 25,000 new playlists with his name during the run.
Polymarket traders noticed the pattern months ago. In September the odds flipped. Bad Bunny jumped from underdog to 69 per cent favourite. Volume doubled. Whales arrived. One wallet dropped $120,000 on him just four days ago. The platform has form on these calls. A University of Chicago paper in October gave Polymarket an 85 per cent hit rate on cultural outcomes, beating traditional forecasts by nearly 20 points.
Swift would need a historic holiday surge to close the gap. Traders don’t see it coming. At 97 per cent, the market isn’t predicting an upset. It’s pricing a return to the throne for the artist who never truly surrendered it. When Spotify Wrapped drops next week, expect the bunny to be back on top.
