Raye says her presale sign-up for This Symphony May Contain Hope, a one-off orchestral show at London's Royal Albert Hall on October 23, 2026, drew 1.8 million registrations for 5,000 seats, and that scalpers used AI bots to create “hundreds of thousands of fake registrations.” Her team responded by reviewing the list by hand and emailing presale codes only to people it believed were real fans.
Registration was supposed to be the safe part: the industry has long sold advance sign-up as the fix for bots. Raye's numbers show what happens when the bots register too.
What happened to the Raye presale?
At the show Raye performs her second album, This Music May Contain Hope, in full with The Heritage Orchestra and Flames Collective. Sign-ups ran through a page hosted by the fan marketing platform co:brand and closed at 5pm BST on October 12, according to Music Business Worldwide; co:brand declined to comment.
Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations. It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale.Raye, Instagram and X, October 13, 2026 (via MBW and PA)
Instead of opening the presale to every registrant, her team manually reviewed the list to identify “a shortlist of people we believe are real fans.” Codes went out by email at 11:45am BST on October 13, and the presale, pushed back two hours to make room for the review, opened at noon on the Royal Albert Hall's own ticketing site. Her reason: “It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.”
The sale still struggled. MBW, citing IQ, reported 5 million access requests when the presale opened and that fans could not complete purchases for 45 minutes, prompting an urgent investigation. A Royal Albert Hall spokesperson told the BBC, per MBW, that the venue invests heavily in protecting its systems from “automated attacks” but the “law needs to catch up.”
What does manual review mean for fans?
In plain terms: registering did not mean qualifying. If no code arrived, you were not shortlisted, and your route is the general sale, which a Live Nation UK listing puts at 10am BST on Thursday, October 15, for whatever tickets remain. As TicketNews noted, the review criteria, the size of the shortlist and the presale allocation have not been disclosed, so a real fan who was cut cannot know why.
| Date (2026) | What happened |
|---|---|
| Oct 12 | Presale sign-up closes, 5pm BST |
| Oct 13 | Raye posts the 1.8 million figure; codes emailed 11:45am; presale opens at noon |
| Oct 15 | General sale, 10am BST |
| Oct 23 | This Symphony May Contain Hope, Royal Albert Hall |
Why didn't registration stop the bots?
A sign-up form asks for what a bot can make in bulk: an email address, maybe a phone number. Ticketmaster's own wording, when it renamed Verified Fan to advance registration in 2023, was that registration “does significantly block bots and professional resellers” while not guaranteeing anyone a ticket, as Digital Music News reported.
A sign-up form proves someone filled in a form. It says nothing about who will be standing in the hall.
The law has a gap here too. The UK's 2018 ticket bot regulations criminalise using software to buy beyond a purchase limit for financial gain; a fake sign-up comes before any purchase. The resale crackdown in the UK's fight against ticket touts targets what happens after the sale and is still only a draft bill.
What can an artist actually do?
- Screen with signals that have a history. Ticketmaster now asks some fans to pass a Persona identity check, a live selfie and sometimes photo ID, to sign up for an artist presale, saying it wants to give “real fans, not bots” a fair shot. Spotify's Reserved tickets skip the form entirely and pick fans by listening history.
- Lean on known accounts. Independent shop Banquet Records said bots are increasingly hitting its bigger shows and urged fans to become registered users because it “helps verify real music-loving humans,” per NME.
- Hold the sellers to their limits. In the US, the FTC's case over whether platforms must enforce their own caps was allowed to go ahead.
Manual review is triage, not a system, and Raye seems to know it: “I'm not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes.” The next sell-out will need a check a bot cannot fill in.