Raye Royal Albert Hall Show Overwhelmed by AI Ticket Bots
Raye's team is manually reviewing 1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats after scalpers used AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations, prompting a wider debate on automated ticket touting.
Raye has said her team is working to identify genuine fans before tickets go on sale for her one-off Royal Albert Hall show, after the registration system was overwhelmed by scalpers using AI bots. The singer revealed that 1.8 million people signed up for just 5,000 seats, with hundreds of thousands of those registrations created by automated software.
In a statement shared with fans, Raye said the sign-up process had been flooded by touts deploying AI bots to generate fake accounts at an unprecedented scale. «It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale,» she said. «It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.»
The show, titled «This Symphony May Contain Hope», will see Raye reimagine her album «This Music May Contain Hope» with an orchestra at the historic London venue on Friday 23 October. Tickets were due to go to pre-sale at midday, but the scale of automated abuse forced a change of approach. Rather than opening a pre-sale that scalpers could exploit, Raye's team is now manually reviewing the sign-up list to identify a shortlist of people believed to be real fans. Those selected will receive a pre-sale link and code by email by 11:45am, with pre-sale tickets going live at midday. Remaining tickets will be available to all on general sale, expected to begin on Thursday 15 October at 10am.
The incident highlights how AI-powered automation is reshaping ticketing, turning registration systems designed to reward genuine interest into targets for software that can generate vast numbers of fake entries in seconds. Raye acknowledged the uncertainty facing the industry, saying: «I'm not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes. Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future.»
Independent record shop Banquet Records also reported that bots are increasingly hitting its bigger shows, noting that while it has manual workarounds, they are very time-consuming. The label urged fans to become registered users on its website so that real music lovers can be more easily distinguished from automated accounts.
The episode adds pressure to a long-running political debate over ticket touting. Earlier this year, former Prime Minister Keir Starmer pledged to «stamp out ticket touts for good» in a letter to live music fans, promising to act as soon as possible. In January 2025, the government announced plans for a price cap on secondary ticket sales and launched a consultation into the industry and controversial dynamic pricing practices. The consultation ran from 10 January to 4 April, but by last November no concrete plans had been announced, prompting artists including Radiohead, Sam Fender and Dua Lipa to call on ministers to keep their pledge.
Days after that statement, the government said it would introduce a price cap on secondary ticket sales to protect fans from rip-off prices. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy said the efforts would be outlined in the King's Speech and would then have to pass both the House of Lords and Parliament to become law. There was widespread disappointment in May when the government shared only a draft bill to stamp out secondary ticketing in the King's Speech.
Since Andy Burnham became Prime Minister, his government has announced details of a £45 million investment to «turn up» the music industry and crack down on scalpers. Ian Murray MP, Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Arts and for Digital Government and Data, said the policy is being worked on and that ministers are keen to deliver it as quickly as possible. «The draft bill is being worked on as we speak,» he said. «We are very keen to get this done as quickly as possible, we have the commitment and we can do it in this term. Everyone is working together to do it and we've done all the consultations already. We want to get this bill through, I am personally committed to it, the secretary of state is too, and it's a great news story for fans. We need to make sure that every single penny that fans spend on tickets is going back into the industry and not into the pockets of touts.»
For now, Raye's team is focused on the immediate task of separating genuine fans from automated registrations, a manual process that underscores how difficult it has become to protect face-value access in an era of AI-driven touting.
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