Singer Raye’s Royal Albert Hall Tickets Expose the Hole in Britain’s Bot Ban

Raye has just answered a software problem the oldest way there is: she had people read the list. Faced with a sign-up for her one-off Royal Albert Hall show that she says scalpers swamped with AI bots, the singer’s team dropped the standard presale and went through the registrations by hand, looking for real fans.

It got the codes out. It also showed where Britain’s long fight with touts has a blind spot. Using bots to beat ticket limits is already a crime in the UK, and the government is drafting a ban on resale above face value. Neither is built around the moment this attack landed: the sign-up list, before a single ticket was on sale.

A sign-up flooded before the sale began

The figure Raye shared is hard to argue with: 1.8 million registrations for a room of 5,000 seats, roughly 360 sign-ups for every chair. “Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations,” she wrote on social media. “It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale.” The bot count is Raye’s own claim; no independent breakdown has appeared in the coverage.

The pressure carried into the sale itself. According to IQ, as reported by Music Business Worldwide, the Royal Albert Hall’s site took 5 million access requests when the presale opened, among the highest presale traffic the venue has seen, and fans could not complete purchases for 45 minutes. The hall told the BBC it invests heavily in protecting its systems from “automated attacks”. It said in 2024 that it had blocked more than 38 million bot requests in a single 24-hour period.

The sign-up page itself ran on Drops, a product from the fan-marketing platform co:brand. Raye’s statement did not name it, and the company declined to comment to Music Business Worldwide.

Britain already banned the bots, at the checkout

In 2018 the UK made it an offence to use software to get round ticket sales limits for profit. “From today I am pleased to say that we have successfully banned the bots,” the then digital minister Margot James said, and the culture department announced that “the tide is now turning against the touts.” The regulation targets software used to complete any part of the ticket purchase process with intent to obtain more than the sales limit. It does not mention sign-ups or registration. Whether flooding a presale list counts as part of buying a ticket is a question the text does not settle.

The newer fix goes after the money. The draft Ticket Tout Ban Bill, set out in the King’s Speech in May, would make resale above face value illegal, cap platform fees and stop people reselling more tickets than they were entitled to buy. Squeezing resale profit attacks the incentive, and the 2018 offence is itself defined by the intent to make money. But the bill is still a draft, facing consultation and scrutiny before it can go to Parliament. When ministers first consulted on resale, UK Music asked for “far tougher controls” on bots; the headline measures stayed focused on resale.

The music business has run out of patience with the pace. UK Music’s Tom Kiehl called the government’s failure to act “a betrayal of millions of music fans”, and Annabella Coldrick of the Music Managers Forum warned that “further delays will cost them dearly.” The Royal Albert Hall put it plainly this week: “Artists and venues are doing everything they can to protect fans, but we cannot solve this problem alone. The law needs to catch up with the scale and sophistication of the ticket touting industry.” The Department for Culture, Media and Sport said it remains “fully committed to stamping out ticket touting for good.”

A fix that fits one room

Raye’s answer fits where she is in her run. She left her label, went independent, and turned My 21st Century Blues into a record six Brit Awards in 2024; this summer she was among the Reading and Leeds headliners. An independent artist with one room to fill can tell her team to sit down and read a list. The show, This Symphony May Contain Hope, is a single night built around her chart-topping second album, This Music May Contain Hope, and a return to the hall where her 2023 orchestral concert, once filmed, earned a Grammy nomination.

A hand-checked shortlist works for 5,000 seats. It is not a system, and Raye did not pretend otherwise. “I’m not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes,” she said. “Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future.” What she wants protected is simple enough: “It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.”

How the remaining tickets are sold

Sign-ups closed on Monday 12 October. Shortlisted fans received a presale link and code by email at 11:45 BST on Tuesday 13 October, and the presale was pushed back two hours. Remaining tickets go on general sale, listed by Live Nation UK for Thursday 15 October at 10am BST. The concert, promoted by Metropolis Music, takes place at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 October.

Eight years after Westminster declared the bots banned, the most effective anti-bot tool at one of London’s most famous venues was a team reading the sign-up list by hand.

Tags: royal albert hall, Raye, This Music May Contain Hope, ticket touts