RAYE’s upcoming one-night-only show at the Royal Albert Hall is one of the hardest tickets to get this year, and now we know exactly how messy it got. The singer revealed that her presale racked up 1.8 million sign-ups for only 5,000 seats, and she says AI bots created hundreds of thousands of fake registrations meant to help scalpers get ahead of real fans.
Instead of letting the chaos play out, RAYE’s team manually reviewed the sign-up list to identify actual fans before sending out presale links and codes, which landed in inboxes today. General sale follows later this week. In her words,“It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale,”adding that the experience“has really opened my eyes”when it comes to the future of ticketing.
The timing makes it all the more stressful, since the October 23 show has RAYE reimagining her Mercury Prize-nominated album This Music May Contain Hope with the Heritage Orchestra, and the Mercury ceremony takes place the night before in Newcastle. It’s a massive week for her, and it almost got hijacked by bots. Have you ever lost tickets to a scalper or a bot? Tell us your worst ticket war story.
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Local Lawton
Local Lawton is a contributor to LocalBeat, covering local news and community stories.