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.”
— RAYE (@raye) October 13, 2026
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
There have been multiple efforts to crack down on the rise of ticket touts in recent years, and earlier this spring, former Prime Minister Keir Starmer vowed to “stamp out ticket touts for good” in a letter to live music fans, promising to act “as soon as possible”, as exclusively revealed by NME.
In January 2025, the government also announced that it would impose a price cap on how much touts can resell tickets for, and also launch an official consultation into the industry and controversial ‘dynamic pricing’ practices. The consultation ran from January 10 until April 4, but by last November no concrete plans had been announced, spurring the likes of Radiohead, Sam Fender, Dua Lipa, and more to call on the government to keep their pledge.
Days after the statement was shared, the government announced its plan to introduce a price cap on secondary ticket sales in a bid to “protect fans from rip-off prices”. At the time, Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy told NME that the efforts would be outlined in the King’s Speech. From there, she explained, it would have to “pass both the Houses of Lords and Parliament to become law”.
There was widespread disappointment back in May when the government shared news of only a draft bill to stamp out secondary ticketing in the King’s speech.
Since Andy Burnham has become PM, his government have announced details of a £45million investment to “turn up” the music industry and crack down on scalpers. Minister for Creative Industries, Media and Arts and for Digital Government and Data Ian Murray MP assured NME that they’re working hard to deliver the aforementioned policy this year.
“The draft bill is being worked on as we speak,” he told NME. “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.”
