Raye says Royal Albert Hall gig sign-up was 'overwhelmed' by ticket touts using AI bots

Singer Raye has said the sign-up list for her one-off gig at the Royal Albert Hall later this month will be checked "manually" after ticket touts using artificial intelligence bots "overwhelmed" the process.

There were 1.8 million sign-ups for This Symphony May Contain Hope, which she will perform at the 5,000-seat venue on 23 October, but most of these were bots.

In a statement posted to Instagram on Tuesday, Raye, 28, said plans for pre-sale tickets have been dropped and her team will instead "manually review" the sign-up list to identify people they believe are real fans.

The Brit Award-winning star wrote: "Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers [US slang for touts] using AI 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.

"It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.

"Therefore, rather than risk opening a presale that scalpers could exploit, we felt the best and safest solution for this specific show was to manually review the sign-up list to identify a shortlist of people we believe are real fans."

Raye, whose real name is Rachel Keen, added: "Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do [about ticketing] in the future. Lots of love, Raye."

A scalper bot is software designed to purchase tickets faster than human users, which results in artificial scarcity and resale profit.

The Royal Albert Hall said the "phenomenal demand" to see artists like Raye creates opportunities for "professional ticket touts to exploit genuine fans".

The venue said it "routinely" blocks millions of bot requests, including more than 38 million in a single 24-hour period.

"Despite these measures, we regularly see tickets advertised at vastly inflated prices. Fans deserve to see the artists they love without being exploited by ticket touts."

Adam Webb, from the FanFair Alliance, told Sarah-Jane Mee on The UK Tonight programme on Sky News that what happened was a "kind of organised crime", the technology used to "unlawfully acquire huge volumes of tickets" which ended up on "large, dominant secondary ticketing websites".

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The problem, he said, is how the business of selling tickets to events has changed, warning that "we've ended up with this very parasitical secondary ticketing market, which is nothing about fans buying tickets. You're talking about large-scale, mainly overseas businesses that are targeting UK events and then re-selling through offshore, unregulated websites.

"Until there's proper enforcement of the law, you end up with so much pressure on the artists' shoulders to try and fix this problem. And it's really, really difficult.

"Raye seems to be pretty honest in her assessment of this today... all she wants to do is play a show to her fans and get her tickets to her fans."

Raye released her debut album My 21st Century Blues in 2023, and the following year, she made BRIT Awards history by winning six gongs, a record for the most wins in a single year.

Her most recent album, This Music May Contain Hope, was released in March.

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