British pop star Raye has spoken about scalpers using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations for her London performance at the Royal Albert Hall, with 1.8 million sign-ups for just 5,000 tickets.
The upcoming October 23rd performance, called This Symphony May Contain Hope, sees Raye perform her second studio album, This Music May Contain Hope, live in full with the Heritage Orchestra and Flames Collective. In an Instagram post ahead of the presale on Tuesday, Raye said bot activity made it impossible to run the presale and review the sign-up list.
“We received 1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats for This Symphony May Contain Hope,” Raye wrote. “Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, 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,” Raye said.
According to Raye, the main motivation behind the decision was to protect fans from paying extra for tickets.
“It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price,” Raye wrote. “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.”
This is the schedule for the people who get the ticket in the end:
“Those selected will receive their presale link and code by email on Tuesday at 11:45am BST. Presale will open at 12pm,” she wrote. “If you do not receive a presale code, the remaining tickets will be available to all on general sale.”
General sale starts on Thursday at 10 a.m. BST.
According to Raye, the whole experience has shown her something important about ticket sales.
“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.”
She ended the letter with “Lots of love, Raye.”
The performance marks the end of a remarkable year for the London-based pop artist, who released her second studio album in March. Raye, whose name is Rachel Keen, has won six Brit Awards in 2024, including Album of the Year for her debut, My 21st Century Blues.
