Raye says AI bots flooded her Royal Albert Hall presale, with 1.8M sign-ups for 5,000 seats

1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats. That’s what Raye’s presale got for her one-off show at London’s Royal Albert Hall, and she says a big share of those sign-ups weren’t people.

“Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations,” Raye wrote on Instagram and X on October 13, 2026, as Music Business Worldwide reported. The show, This Symphony May Contain Hope, is on October 23, with her second album played in full alongside The Heritage Orchestra and Flames Collective.

How AI bots overwhelmed Raye’s Royal Albert Hall presale

Fans registered on a sign-up page run by co:brand, a fan marketing platform. Sign-ups closed at 5pm BST on Monday, October 12, and presale codes were due by email the next morning.

Then the bots showed up. “It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale,” Raye wrote. So instead of sending codes to every address on the list, her team went through it by hand and shortlisted the people it believed were real fans.

That review pushed the presale back by 2 hours, IQ reported. Once it opened on the Royal Albert Hall’s own site, the venue logged 5 million access requests. Fans then couldn’t complete purchases for 45 minutes, which prompted an “urgent investigation,” according to IQ.

Resale listings still showed up fast. One fan posted that 4 standing tickets were already on StubHub at £608 each while they were still queuing, in a comment quoted by Digital Music News.

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It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.

Royal Albert Hall says the law needs to catch up on ticket bots

The Royal Albert Hall has been blocking bots since at least 2024. A spokesperson told the BBC it “invest[s] heavily” in protecting its ticketing from “automated attacks,” but that the “law needs to catch up.” Back in July 2024, the Hall said it had blocked more than 38 million bot requests in a single 24-hour period.

The UK law in question is still a draft. In November 2025 the government announced plans to ban reselling tickets above face value, cap resale fees and stop anyone reselling more tickets than they were allowed to buy, which targets bulk buying by bots. Those measures went into the King’s Speech in May 2026 as a draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill.

Bots faking fans show up on the streaming side too. A US court just jailed Michael Smith for using bot accounts to stream AI-generated songs, and Queen’s University Belfast research warned in August that UK bot rules lag behind the EU and the US.

Raye’s next step is open. “I’m not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes,” she wrote. General sale opens on Thursday, October 15 at 10am.