A London concert by Raye has run into a problem that is becoming common in live music: automated software crowding out genuine fans. The singer’s team says the pre-sale for her Royal Albert Hall date was flooded with fake registrations, and they are now checking the list by hand.
A Sign-Up Count Far Beyond the Room
After Raye announced the show at the London venue, which holds roughly 5,000 people, the pre-sale registration page recorded about 1.8 million sign-ups. That works out to hundreds of applicants for every available seat. High demand was expected for an artist of her profile, but the scale of the response made her camp suspicious.
According to her team, the surge was not driven by fans alone. They believe resellers used AI-powered bots to generate huge numbers of bogus registrations, likely in the hundreds of thousands, in an attempt to secure tickets they could later resell at inflated prices.
Manual Checks to Protect Real Fans
In response, Raye’s team is going through the registrations manually, trying to separate real supporters from automated entries. The aim is to make sure the people who actually get the chance to buy tickets are fans who want to attend. Checking the list by hand is slow and labor-intensive, which suggests that automated filters alone were not considered reliable enough in this case.
The episode shows how artists are increasingly forced to take on ticket-fairness problems themselves. Pre-sale systems are meant to reward dedicated fans, but a sign-up process that is open to automation can be exploited as easily as a standard on-sale.
Part of a Wider AI Conversation in Music
The Raye story was reported by Music Ally in its daily roundup of music and artificial intelligence news. The same digest flagged several other developments touching on the industry’s relationship with AI, including the creation of a senior AI role at Universal Music Group, news of a bankruptcy involving Character.AI, and the launch of a project called Rocketship. Details on those items were not part of the excerpt available, but their appearance together underlines how many different ways AI is now entering the music business, from creative tools and corporate strategy to the fraud and scalping that artists and fans face.
What It Means for Fans
For ordinary listeners, the Raye case is a reminder that a huge sign-up number does not necessarily reflect real demand. When a 5,000-capacity room attracts 1.8 million registrations, a large portion of that interest may be artificial. Artists and promoters are likely to keep experimenting with stricter verification, manual review and other safeguards as bots become more sophisticated.
For now, Raye’s team is continuing its review so that tickets reach genuine supporters rather than resellers.
Source: Music Ally
