Raye said that the on-sale for her upcoming one-off This Symphony May Contain Hope concert at London’s Royal Albert Hall has been “overwhelmed” by scalpers using AI bots trying to get their hands on tickets.
The British singer-songwriter took to socials late Monday, noting that the show had seen 1.8 million sign-ups for the 5,000-cap concert date, and that the scalpers’ AI bots had caused “hundreds of thousands of fake registrations.”
“It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale,” Raye wrote, further noting that her team is going through the sign-ups to determine real fan registrations. “It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price. Therefore rather than risk opening a presale that scalpers could exploit, we felt the best and safest solution for this specific show was to manually review the sign-up list to identify a shortlist of people we believe are real fans.”
Alongside the competition concerns on the primary ticket market — Ticketmaster and Live Nation recently lost a consequential monopoly lawsuit in the U.S. — predatory resale on the secondary market is one of the biggest issues beleaguering the live music industry today. While concert ticket prices continue to climb, face value ticket prices on the market’s highest-demand shows are still often less than what the market could bear, drawing in resellers.
In the U.S., several markets such as Massachusetts, Washington, D.C. and Vermont have begun adopting laws to place caps on how much a ticket can be re-sold for in an effort to curb ticket brokers, garnering support from musicians including Noah Kahan as well as criticism from the brokers themselves. California sought to adopt a price cap law this year as well, though the bill, which faced extensive lobbying from ticket resale platform StubHub, had failed.
In her post on Monday night, Raye said that “I’m not sure what the future holds for ticketing,” further adding that “I do know this experience really opened my eyes.”
“Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future,” she said.