Raye hits back at ticket touts who took over Albert Hall sign-up

Raye has hit back at ticket touts who she says “overwhelmed” the sign-up process for an upcoming live show by using artificial intelligence (AI) bots to create “hundreds of thousands of fake registrations”.

The Where Is My Husband! singer revealed there were 1.8 million sign-ups for her one-off 5,000-seat performance at the Royal Albert Hall on 23 October.

To avoid a pre-sale which she felt scalpers could exploit, Raye said the sign-up list had been manually reviewed to identify a shortlist of people believed to be “real fans”.

A spokesperson for the Royal Albert Hall said they “invest heavily” in protecting their ticketing systems from “automated attacks” but the “law needs to catch up”.

The award-winning artist said she had “never witnessed bots on this scale” and was changing the process as it is “so important” to her that fans can buy tickets at the face value price.

“I’m not sure what the future holds for ticketing, I do know this experience has really opened my eyes,” she said in a statement shared on her social media accounts, external.

“Me and my team are going to think really hard about what we can do in the future.”

Raye said the fans manually selected would receive a pre-sale link and code by email at 11:45 BST on Tuesday, and pre-sale opened shortly afterwards.

She added that the remaining tickets would be available to all on general sale.

This Symphony May Contain Hope show will showcase songs from her recent chart-topping second album, This Music May Contain Hope, that fuses old-school jazz with orchestral sound, blues, big band and soul.

The 17-track record is a concept album which explores overcoming heartbreak, self-doubt and internet trolling.