Raye is a British singer-songwriter who planned on holding an intimate one-night concert for her fans next week.
The event's venue has capacity for 5,000 attendees. There were 1.8 million sign-ups for tickets. It sounds like a good problem to have, right? Having that many fans? One problem. The vast majority of those sign-ups were AI bots, according to Raye, run by profit-seeking resellers hoping to make money off her fans.
"This Symphony May Contain Hope" is a planned one-night live concert by Raye at the Royal Albert Hall in London on Oct. 23. It appears the singer was expecting to receive thousands of sign-ups and then send out a pre-sale link for interested parties, with tickets available on a first-come, first-served basis.
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However, Raye wasn't expecting the resellers and AI bots to hit as hard as they did.
"Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations," Raye wrote on her X account. "It's a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale."
"It is so important to me that fans can be tickets at the face value price," she continued.
Raye says that for this special event only, she and her team would manually review the sign-up list and send a pre-sale link and code to individuals that they believe are real fans.
"I'm not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes," Raye said.
Resellers have always been a problem when it comes to tickets for concerts, tours, and sporting events. However, the rise of AI has helped resellers streamline and scale their ticket buying, often leaving few, if any, regular-price tickets for actual fans.
Some artists have been forced to get creative in how they sell tickets to ensure availability. Spotify recently released features to help artists identify their real fans and offer them first dibs on tickets to local shows.
In the United States, the Federal Trade Commission recently sued Ticketmaster, which controls a majority of the U.S. concert market, for allegedly working with resellers to inflate ticket prices. Ticketmaster denied the accusation, but a jury later found that the company gouged customers and abused its monopoly power. Still, a long-term solution to the reselling problem is desperately needed.
While scrubbing through AI bot accounts may be possible for a special one-off event, it doesn't seem feasible for months-long nationwide or even global touring events.