RAYE blames AI bots for Royal Albert Hall presale chaos after 1.8m sign-ups
RAYE has blamed scalpers using AI bots for overwhelming the sign-up for her one-night-only show at London's Royal Albert Hall on 23 October. The singer said 1.8 million people registered for about 5,000 seats, with hundreds of thousands of fake entries created to game the sale, according to Billboard.
She set out the problem in an Instagram post on Tuesday, 13 October. She said scalpers had used AI bots, software that can complete online forms at speed and at scale, to flood the registration system. A scalper is someone who buys tickets to resell them, often at a higher price.
Her team decided not to open the presale to the full list. The risk, she said, was that bots would snap up codes meant for fans. Staff would instead review the names by hand and pull out a shortlist they believed belonged to genuine fans.
Those selected were to receive a presale link and code by email by 11:45 a.m. BST on 13 October. The first sale was due to start at midday. A presale is an early sale held before tickets go on sale to the general public. Any tickets left after that sale were to go on general sale later in the week.
The manual check meant a delay. It also meant most of the 1.8 million who signed up would not get a code. Demand far exceeds supply.
The 23 October concert is listed as This Symphony May Contain Hope, presented by Metropolis Music, according to the Royal Albert Hall. The listing gives doors at 7:15 p.m. and a start at 8:00 p.m. in the Auditorium. RAYE is due to reimagine her album This Music May Contain Hope with the Heritage Orchestra.
Her official website also lists the 23 October 2026 date at the Royal Albert Hall in London. The hall holds about 5,000 people for this show.
The album at the centre of the night reached No. 1 on the U.K. Official Albums Chart, the weekly ranking of the most-bought and most-streamed albums in Britain, and No. 11 on the Billboard 200 in the United States. It is nominated for the Mercury Prize, the annual award for the best album from Britain and Ireland, due to be presented on 22 October in Newcastle. The London show falls the night after that ceremony.
For fans, this means a tight window. A shortlisted group gets the first chance at midday. Everyone else must wait for the general sale, with no guarantee tickets will remain.
