Raye’s team have spent days sifting through registrations by hand after the sign-up for her Royal Albert Hall concert was flooded by scalpers using AI bots. The one-off show on Friday 23 October drew 1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats, and the singer said hundreds of thousands of those were fake. The episode has become a sharp example of a problem that artists, labels and the government have been trying to tackle for years.
The concert, This Symphony May Contain Hope, will reimagine her album This Music May Contain Hope with an orchestra. Rather than open a presale that touts could exploit, her team built a shortlist of people they judged to be real fans and emailed them a link and code before tickets went live at midday on 13 October. Anyone left off the list can try in the general sale from 10am on Thursday 15 October. Raye said: “I have never witnessed bots on this scale.”
She added that the experience had changed how she thinks about ticketing and that her team would consider further changes. Banquet Records, which releases her music, said bots are increasingly targeting its larger shows. Manual checks can work, it said, but they take a great deal of time, and it has asked fans to register on its website so they can be told apart from automated accounts.
The policy background shows how slowly the issue has moved. In January 2025, the government announced plans for a price cap on resale tickets and a consultation on the industry and dynamic pricing, which ran until 4 April. By November no firm plans had appeared, prompting Radiohead, Sam Fender, Dua Lipa and others to press ministers. Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy later said the cap would feature in the King’s Speech, but in May only a draft bill was included, which disappointed much of the music industry.
Andy Burnham’s government has since announced £45 million to support the music industry and tackle scalpers. Minister Ian Murray MP said the draft bill is still being worked on and that the aim is to pass it during this parliamentary term. Until then, the burden of filtering out bots falls on artists and their teams, as Raye’s case shows, and the time spent checking lists by hand is unlikely to be practical for every large on-sale.
