Bots Disrupt Ticket Sales for Raye, Garth Brooks and Sam Fender
Automated bots disrupted ticket sales for three major acts in October, and one show in Kansas City was cancelled as a result. The acts were Raye, Garth Brooks and Sam Fender, and the trouble ran from London to Kansas City to Newcastle, according to Music Business Worldwide.
A presale is an early sale for people who have signed up or hold a code, held before tickets go on general release. Bots are software programs that can fill a queue or grab seats far faster than a person can.
Raye's show at London's Royal Albert Hall on October 23 drew 1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats. The sign-ups ran through a page hosted by fan marketing platform co:brand. On October 13, Raye said scalpers had used AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations. Her team then checked the list by hand and emailed presale codes to people it believed were real fans.
Garth Brooks' Kansas City matinee at T-Mobile Center, sold through the AXS ticketing site, was a larger problem. More than 90,000 people were in the queue when tickets went on sale, and most of them were bots. Sales were shut down shortly after opening on October 23, and the show was later cancelled. In a post on Facebook, Brooks' team said bot prevention software had detected thousands of bots trying to buy tickets.
Sam Fender's trouble came in Newcastle, England. His presale for St James' Park was hit at the ticketing site Gigantic. On October 28, the presale for his Newcastle homecoming shows was postponed after promoters reported what they called a sophisticated bot attack. The presale was then moved to 9:30am on Thursday, October 29.
The scale of the problem is large. In an October 13 court filing responding to a lawsuit from the US Federal Trade Commission, the regulator that enforces the BOTS Act, a US law aimed at ticket-buying bots, Live Nation and Ticketmaster said they had detected and blocked nearly 260 million bot attempts a day in 2025.
The issue has also reached UK politics. In October, UK lawmakers moved to tighten rules on ticket selling after Raye's presale was overwhelmed. The government's background notes for the King's Speech 2026, the event that sets out the year's proposed laws, propose making it illegal to resell a live event ticket for more than its original cost. The government estimated that the cap would lower the average price of a resale ticket by £37.
For fans, the practical result is simple. Many people who wanted a seat found the queue was full of software, not other fans. Ticket sellers are now checking sign-ups by hand, delaying sales, and in some cases calling off dates, while lawmakers in the UK and the US are weighing new rules.
