Article 278: Raye's Royal Albert Hall Show Had 1.8 Million Sign-Ups for 5,000 Seats

Raye says ticket scalpers used AI bots to generate "hundreds of thousands of fake registrations" for her Royal Albert Hall show. Roughly 1.8 million people registered for about 5,000 seats. The registration system - the standard modern defence against scalping - was the attack surface: bots did not beat the queue, they joined it hundreds of thousands of times.

Key Takeaway: Bot defence has spent a decade hardening the checkout, which is why the bots moved to the sign-up form. A queue that costs nothing to join and cannot distinguish a fan from a script is not a fairness mechanism, it is a denial-of-service target pointed at the artist's own audience. Any allocation scheme whose access rule is "register your interest" has an unbounded attacker budget problem it has not priced in.

Source: Music Business Worldwide, Mashable, 13-15 October 2026