Raye Ticket Sign-Ups Draw 1.8 Million for 5,000 Seats
Raye said ticket touts using AI bots overwhelmed sign-ups for her one-off Royal Albert Hall show, with 1.8 million registrations for 5,000 seats. Her team…
LONDON — Raye Royal Albert Hall ticket sign-ups drew 1.8 million registrations for a one-off show with 5,000 seats, raising concerns over AI bots and resale tactics. The singer said ticket touts overwhelmed the registration process, prompting her team to manually review the list before choosing fans for a pre-sale.
The show, called This Symphony May Contain Hope, is scheduled for 23 October. Raye said hundreds of thousands of registrations were fake, and that she had never seen bots operate on this scale.
Fans selected by the team were due to receive a pre-sale link and code by email at 11:45 BST on Tuesday. Raye said the remaining tickets would be offered through a general sale. The screening was intended to reduce the risk of touts exploiting an open pre-sale and buying tickets for resale above face value.
Manual review after 1.8 million registrations
Raye said the scale of the registrations forced her team to rethink how it handled ticket access. In a statement shared on social media, she said: “I'm not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes.”
She added: “Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future.”
The gap between registrations and available seats illustrates the pressure on the process. With far more sign-ups than places, a system vulnerable to automated entries could make it harder for genuine fans to secure tickets at face value. The manual review was Raye’s team’s response for this particular show; she did not announce a broader ticketing plan.
The Royal Albert Hall said it invests heavily in protecting its ticketing systems from automated attacks, but argued that the law has not kept pace with the problem. A spokesperson for the venue said: “Artists and venues are doing everything they can to protect fans, but we cannot solve this problem alone.”
The venue also said it strongly supports the government’s plan to improve ticketing laws. Its spokesperson added: “The law needs to catch up with the scale and sophistication of the ticket touting industry.”
Government plan faces further scrutiny
A spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport said the government remained “fully committed to stamping out ticket touting for good”. The government has announced plans to ban the resale of live-event tickets above face value, while a draft Ticket Tout Bill is set to undergo further consultation and scrutiny before it can become law.
The bill has drawn frustration from music industry and consumer groups over the pace of progress. The dispute matters beyond one concert: fans may face inflated resale prices when ticket demand outstrips supply, while artists and venues say they cannot tackle automated buying on their own.
Raye’s concert will feature songs from her second album, This Music May Contain Hope, which combines old-school jazz with orchestral sound, blues, big band and soul. The album is a 17-track concept record exploring heartbreak, self-doubt and internet trolling.
For this show, the immediate safeguard is a human review of registrations, followed by a general sale for tickets left over. The registration total was 1.8 million for 5,000 seats.
Source: bbc.co.uk
