Raye performing live. Photo Credit: Drew de F Fawkes
Raye’s 5,000-capacity Royal Albert Hall concert was inundated with 1.8 million presale sign-ups and “hundreds of thousands of fake registrations” – prompting the artist and her team to conduct a manual review in an effort to identify “real fans.”
That’s according to London-born Raye herself, who provided an update on Instagram. As diehard supporters are aware, the 28-year-old is scheduled to perform This Music May Contain Hope in its entirety as part of “This Symphony May Contain Hope” on October 23rd.
But the show’s famed venue can accommodate 5,000 or so attendees, and Raye’s Instagram post announcing the once-off concert racked up north of 550,000 likes. Put differently, with demand clearly outstripping supply, the stage was set for another messy on-sale and resulting hard feelings.
Back to Raye’s message, then, “1.8 million sign-ups” poured in for the available tickets, with scalpers having “overwhelmed” the system.
“Sadly our sign-up process was overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations,” Raye wrote. “It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale.
“It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price,” she continued. “Therefore rather than risk opening a presale that scalpers could exploit, we felt the best and safest solution for this specific show was to manually review the sign-up list to identify a shortlist of people we believe are real fans.”
As AI-powered automation is all the rage, that a straightforward manual review was deemed the “safest solution” is telling. On the other side of this coin, however, opting to utilize Spotify Reserved (which forwards presale codes to superfans based on historical consumption data) or a similar model may have been the wiser course.
In any event, the access codes (or perhaps “code” – more here in a moment) went out to the “real fans” today. On Reddit and X, would-be ticket purchasers are describing a massive queue and corresponding difficulties obtaining passes.
“Can’t even get a position for @raye and I’ve been in the queue since 12 yet there’s 4 standing tickets already on stub hub for £608 each and a bunch of fake accounts on here offering ‘extra tickets’ because they thought they may as well save some for others,” one fan vented.
“I got a code but couldn’t get in the queue. I’m still 25000 and have been queuing since 12pm,” a Redditor echoed. “But someone else I know joined about 10 minutes ago and is ahead of me so I have no idea how the queuing system even works. It’s very frustrating.”
Assuming these and similar comments are accurate – of course, evidence strongly suggests that they are – it appears that prospective customers had to enter a code before purchasing tickets as opposed to joining the queue.
(Also, not all the tickets released in this manner; “the remaining tickets will be available to all on general sale,” Raye clarified.)
Regarding the use of the singular “code,” different individuals yet are indicating that there was, in fact, one generic code in place for the checkout process.
And as lamented by others, resale passes are currently available to purchase at huge markups via certain secondary platforms. (Curiously, one of the appropriate event pages stresses that the “(r)esale of tickets is prohibited.”)
On the regulatory front, “ticket tout” legislation doesn’t appear to be a top priority across the pond, and enforcing the floated law could prove challenging in its own right. But artists aren’t necessarily without options; it was only last month that Oasis and Live Nation threatened to cancel resale passes to the band’s sold-out 2027 tour.
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