Raye Says Scalpers Used AI Bots to “Overwhelm” Sign Ups For Royal Albert Hall Show as 1.8 Million Register For Tickets
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Raye says AI bots generated hundreds of thousands of fake registrations for her Royal Albert Hall concert, prompting her team to review applications manually. The move is intended to identify genuine fans and give them a fair chance to buy tickets at face value.
The one-off *This Symphony May Contain Hope* show has 5,000 tickets and drew 1.8 million sign-ups. Raye’s team chose not to open a presale that resellers could exploit, as ticket resale and rising prices remain wider concerns for the live music industry.
- Raye’s team is manually checking registrations for fake sign-ups.
- 1.8 million people registered for a 5,000-ticket concert.
- The singer wants genuine fans to pay face value.
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The Royal Albert Hall is a concert venue in London, and Raye is a British singer-songwriter. Her one-off show, This Symphony May Contain Hope, has 5,000 tickets, while 1.8 million people registered for the chance to buy one.
Ticket scalpers buy tickets to resell, often at higher prices. Automated bots can submit large numbers of registrations quickly, making it harder to distinguish genuine fans from people seeking tickets for resale. Raye’s team is reviewing registrations by hand and chose not to hold a presale.
The issue matters because high resale prices can put live music beyond some fans’ budgets. In the United States, some local and state authorities are pursuing limits on how much tickets can be resold for.
Both sides, in good faith
The strongest fair case each way — we don't pick a winner.
The case for
Manually reviewing registrations could help distinguish genuine fans from automated applications and give more people a chance to buy tickets at face value. With far more registrations than seats, and a risk that bots could exploit a presale, extra checks may be a reasonable way to protect access and limit scalping.
The case against
Manual review can be slow and opaque, and genuine fans may be wrongly excluded while applicants have little recourse. Some may argue that clear, consistently applied rules and transparent ticket allocation would be fairer than case-by-case decisions, even if no process can meet demand for a show with so few seats.