Raye Overhauls Royal Albert Hall Ticket Plan as Bots Flood 1.8M Sign-Ups
The singer scrapped the open presale for her Oct. 23 symphonic show 'This Symphony May Contain Hope' after scalpers used AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations for 5,000 seats. Her team will now manually review the list to find real fans.
Raye is throwing out the ticketing plan for her one-off Royal Albert Hall show. The British singer said Tuesday that scalpers using AI bots flooded the sign-up process for “This Symphony May Contain Hope” — 1.8 million registrations came in for 5,000 seats.
Hundreds of thousands of those sign-ups were fake. Raye said the bots generated them on behalf of touts trying to grab tickets for the Oct. 23 show.
“We received 1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats for This Symphony May Contain Hope,” she wrote in a statement posted Tuesday on Instagram and X. “Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations.”
There will be no open presale now. Her team will manually review the sign-up list and pull out a shortlist of people it believes are real fans. Those fans received their presale link and code by email at 11:45 a.m. BST on Tuesday, and the presale opened at noon.
“It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale,” she wrote. “It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.”
Anyone without a presale code waits for Thursday. The general sale starts Oct. 15 at 10 a.m.
The show reimagines her second album, This Music May Contain Hope, with a full orchestra. Raye will perform with her band, the Heritage Orchestra, and the Flames Collective choir at the London venue.
“I’m not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes,” she wrote. “Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future.”
