Raye has revealed that her team are working to try and identify “real fans” ahead of tickets going on sale for her gig at Royal Albert Hall, following nearly 2million sign-ups and the system being “overwhelmed by scalpers using AI bots”.
The gig refers to the special one off show she announced for the historic London venue last week, which will see her reimagine her album ‘This Music May Contain Hope’ with an orchestra.
Set to take place on Friday October 23, tickets for the ‘This Symphony May Contain Hope’ show are set to go to pre-sale today (Tuesday October 13), however, Raye has now shared an update saying that the system has already been “overwhelmed” by scalpers and AI bots, and that they are trying to make the process fairer for “real fans”.
“We received 1.8 million sign-ups for 5000 seats,” her post began. “Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using Al bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations.”
“It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale,” she continued, adding that “It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.”
The singer went on to say that to prevent “opening a presale that scalpers could exploit”, her team are now going to “manually review the sign-up list to identify a shortlist of people we believe are real fans”. Those selected will receive a pre-sale link and code by email by 11:45am today, and pre-sale tickets will go live at midday.
“If you do not receive a presale code, the remaining tickets will be available to all on general sale,” Raye added, with the general on sale still expected to commence on Thursday (October 15) at 10am.
Concluding, she wrote: “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.”
Banquet Records also spoke about the impact that scalpers are having too, writing that “bots are increasingly hitting Banquet’s bigger shows” and that while they “have manual work arounds, they’re very time consuming”. The label also urged people to became “registered user” on their website so that they can more easily be differentiated from the bots.
bots are increasingly hitting Banquet’s bigger shows too. we have manual work arounds but they’re very time consuming.
becoming a registered user at https://t.co/rENZLZT8ax helps verify real music-loving humans https://t.co/waVZMCRCbM
— Banquet Records (@BanquetRecords) October 13, 2026
