RAYE Changes Ticket Pre-Sale After 'AI Bots' and Scalpers Flood Sign-Ups: 'Never Witnessed Bots on This Scale'

Singer RAYE has been forced to rethink her ticketing strategy after the pre-sale for her upcoming 'This Symphony May Contain Hope' show was overwhelmed by bots and scalpers. The sign-up process drew 1.8 million sign-ups for 5,000 seats, leaving her team scrambling to protect genuine fans.

'Sadly, our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations,' RAYE said on social media. 'It is a new world we are living in now. I have never witnessed bots on this scale.'

What Is 'This Symphony May Contain Hope'?

The 28-year-old British singer-songwriter is preparing a one-off show at London's Royal Albert Hall scheduled for Friday, 23 October 2026. It will feature music from her second studio album, 'This Music May Contain Hope', arranged with a full orchestra.

The album features the hit 'Where Is My Husband!', which became the first official UK No. 1 single of 2026. The song also peaked at No. 11 on the Billboard Hot 100 chart and has surpassed one billion streams on Spotify.

This will not be RAYE's first concert with an orchestra. She also performed at a one-night-only concert in 2023, backed by the 50-piece Heritage Orchestra and Flames Collective. The event featured songs from her debut album, 'My 21st Century Blues'. The resulting concert film, 'Live at the Royal Albert Hall', was nominated for Best Music Film at the 68th Grammy Awards.

Tickets for the Real Fans

'It is so important to me that fans can buy the tickets at face value price,' RAYE said of the decision to cancel the original pre-sale sign-up process. The organisers will now manually review sign-ups 'to identify a shortlist of people we believe are real fans'.

Those who miss out on pre-sale tickets can still buy them during the general sale. 'I'm not sure what the future holds for ticketing; I do know this experience has opened my eyes,' RAYE added. The singer also said that her team would look into what they could do in the future to ensure fans, rather than scalpers, get access to tickets.

The global ticket-scalping problem is also the motivation behind California Assemblymember Matt Haney's proposed California Fans First Act, introduced as Assembly Bill 1720. The bill aims to protect fans from price gouging in the ticket resale market by capping resale prices at 10% above face value.

'They buy as many of them as they can and then they jack up the price and pocket the profit. It's wrong,' Haney said of scalpers.

Fan Reactions

'Well, would ya look at that. An artist can actually care to get their fans face value tickets... and RAYE remains superior once again,' one fan said.

Another fan also shared their experience of queuing for a pre-sale ticket: 'RAYE's Royal Albert Hall presale is now SOLD OUT, with over 25,000 people still in the waiting room for a show with a capacity of around 5,000.'

Others warned of broader consequences within the music industry: 'If we don't figure out a way to mitigate this, live music is genuinely doomed and it's so devastating,' one user posted. Independent music store Banquet Records also weighed in: 'Bots are increasingly hitting Banquet's bigger shows too. We have manual workarounds but they're very time-consuming.'