Raye Says Scalpers Used AI Bots to Generate 1.8 Million Registrations for Royal Albert Hall Show

The British singer-songwriter said: I have never seen bots on this scale.

Rae said sales of the symphony's may-have-been concert at London's Royal Albert Hall had been "drowned" by scalpers using artificial intelligence bots.

The British singer-songwriter took to social media late Monday, noting that the app had 1.8 million sign-ups for the 5,000-person concert date and that scalper AI bots had caused "hundreds of thousands of fake sign-ups."

"It's a new world we live in now, I've never seen robots on this scale," Ray wrote. It's very important to me that fans can buy tickets at face value. "So instead of risking a pre-sale that scalpers could exploit, we felt the best and safest solution for this particular show was to manually review the registration list to identify a short list of people we believe are true fans."

Along with competitive concerns in the primary ticket market—Ticketmaster and Live Nation recently lost a follow-on monopoly lawsuit in the U.S.—predatory resale in the secondary market is one of the biggest issues challenging the live music industry today. While concert ticket prices continue to rise, face value tickets at high-demand shows are still often priced below what the market can bear and attract sellers.

In the United States, several markets such as Massachusetts, Washington, D.C., and Vermont have introduced open cap laws in an effort to crack down on ticket brokers, drawing support from musicians including Noah Kahan as well as criticism from the brokers themselves. California also sought to pass a price-cap law this year, though the bill was defeated after extensive lobbying by ticket resale platform StubHub.

In his post Monday night, Roy said that "I'm not sure what the future holds for ticket sales," adding that "I know this experience really opened my eyes."

"My team and I are thinking really hard about what we can do next," he said.