WWE Doesn't Need To Pipe In Fake Crowd Noise Anymore... So Why Do They Keep Doing It?

WWE may be in the midst of its biggest boom period since the Attitude Era, making more money than at any other point in its history from a highly engaged audience willing to pay exorbitant prices for a hot product, but the promotion can't stop tinkering with fake crowd reactions.

Bizarrely, the latest example comes not from the latest episode of Raw or SmackDown, but from WrestleMania 40. This weekend, Reddit user u/ChrisJTW97 posted a clip of artificial "This is awesome!" chants added to the April 2024 event, specifically the six-pack Undisputed WWE Tag Team Championship Ladder Match.

These reactions, which weren't part of the initial airing, are obviously fake. They are too sparse and intimate to come from even the ringside pocket of a 60,000+ crowd and transition too quickly to canned jeers. They don't match the crowd's movements, either, which is always the clearest tell of artificial reactions. Follow the audience. Nobody is chanting, nobody is clapping, because the chant isn't real.

A more recent example came on the 10 March 2025 episode of Raw, when Logan Paul cut an in-ring promo designed to involve comedian Andrew Schulz in the show. The hook was Schulz insulting Paul by saying nobody was there to see Logan, but "real wrestlers" like AJ Styles. Paul pulled Schulz over the barricade, prompting Styles to run out, hit Logan with a Phenomenal Forearm, and send Paul scampering up to the stage.

BOO this man!#WWERaw pic.twitter.com/ChbXMlu3m9— WWE (@WWE) March 11, 2025

Before the segment turned to action, WWE tried to create the perception that Paul was being booed so loudly that he could barely speak, by piping artificial jeers into the building and onto the broadcast. Listen to each round of "boos." Each sounds identical, beginning on the exact same tone. Now watch the audience the few times WWE's cameras pan out (presumably, they kept the cameras tight on Paul to preserve the illusion). You'll see a handful of people booing, but only a handful - and nowhere near enough to align with the noise.

Of course, crowd-sweetening is nothing new for WWE. You can go as far back as Sid Justice's elimination of Hulk Hogan in the 1992 Royal Rumble for a historical example of the promotion adding fake crowd noise when an organic moment doesn't align with the perception they want to create. Still, that WWE insists on using it in the modern era, when its audience is generally engaged and locked in, is crazy.

Then again, the vast majority of WWE's consumers appear either incapable of identifying the artificial noise (despite the obvious tells) or simply do not care about this subversion of the art of professional wrestling, the whole point of which is supposed to be organic crowd manipulation through effective storytelling.

Not hitting booo.wav and thisisawesome.mp3 to create a false perception of how the segment is going.