Raye asked fans to sign up for a special show. AI bots showed up 1.8 million times instead.
Singer Raye planned a one-night concert at London's Royal Albert Hall for Oct. 23, with 5,000 seats and a sign-up process meant to route a pre-sale link to real fans first. Her team logged 1.8 million registrations, which she says were overwhelmingly fake entries generated by reseller bots. Raye said on X she had never seen bot traffic at this scale, and that her team would now hand-review every sign-up to decide who gets the pre-sale code. That works for one show. It is not realistic for a monthslong tour.
Scalping is old news. What is new here is the ratio: when 1.8 million sign-ups chase 5,000 seats and most of them are automated, a real fan has almost no chance of getting a pre-sale link without someone manually checking the list. This also lands months after a jury found Ticketmaster gouged customers and abused its market power through reseller deals, so the pressure on ticketing platforms to show they are not profiting from the same bots keeps building.
Spotify's recent push to let artists flag real fans for early access shows the industry already knows manual review does not scale. It just has not found what does.