2026 Reading & Leeds headliner Raye has aired her frustration over the state of ticketing markets after the sign-ups for her next show attracted nearly 2 million applications, many of them submitted by bots and ticket touts. Her one-off performance at London’s Royal Albert Hall later this month has a capacity of 5,000, with the singer claiming AI was used to create “hundreds of thousands of fake registrations”.
British singer-songwriter Raye has had a phenomenal year – her massive 2025 single ‘Where Is My Husband!’ was the first UK Number One of 2026, with her second album ‘This Music May Contain Hope’ scoring a Number One Album in the UK and Ireland, also making the shortlist for the Mercury Prize going into the ceremony on October 22. After further acclaim from her fantastic set on Glastonbury’s Pyramid Stage in 2025, she headlined the new Grid Stage at this year’s Reading & Leeds Festival.
Her special night, This Symphony May Contain Hope at the Royal Albert Hall was set up with a sign-up process, similar to the one employed in Oasis’s massive sale in September, attempting to replace a conventional pre-sale process which scalpers are known to exploit. Raye hoped that a manually-reviewed list of applicants would lead to the tickets landing in the hands of “real fans”. The fans selected by the screening would receive access to the pre-sale this morning, Tuesday October 13, ahead of general sale on Thursday October 15.
♥️ https://t.co/G5BsGJu5EE
— RAYE (@raye) October 13, 2026
However, Raye announced on social media this morning before the sale that the system had been “overwhelmed by scalpers, using AI bots to create hundreds of thousands of fake registrations.” Over 1.8 million sign-ups had been received for the allocation of 5,000 tickets, with Raye writing “it is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale.” She continued “It is so important to me that fans can buy tickets at the face value price. 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.”
BBC News report that a spokesperson for the Royal Albert Hall has said the “law needs to catch up on the scale and sophistication of the ticket touting industry”, and that they “invest heavily” in protecting themselves from what they call “automated attacks”. In May this year, there was discontent from artists and industry officials when the government’s proposed ‘Ticket Tout Bill’ was ‘downgraded’ to a draft bill, which takes longer to pass through parliamentary procedures – currently, the draft bill is still in policy limbo. Following Raye’s statement, a spokesperson for the Department for Culture, Media and Sport has said that they are still “fully committed to stamping out ticket touting for good.”
Raye’s post ends with the remark “I’m not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes. Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future.”
This Symphony May Contain Hope is set to be a symphonic and orchestral live reimagining of ‘This Music May Contain Hope’, reinventing and re-exploring the album’s 17 tracks in one of the most famous venues in England. She will be supported on the night by her backing band, plus The Heritage Orchestra and Flames Collective. It follows her previous 2023 show at the Royal Albert Hall, which was released as a concert film and live album ‘Live at the Royal Albert Hall’, which was nominated for Best Music Film at this year’s Grammys.
