RAYE condemns scalpers who ‘overwhelmed’ sign-up for Royal Albert Hall show: ‘This experience has really opened my eyes’

Pop star RAYE has informed fans that she and her team have been forced to manually review sign-ups for tickets to her one-off Royal Albert Hall show, after the process was overwhelmed by scalpers.

The “Where is My Husband!” artist shared a post to Instagram on Tuesday (13 October), explaining that her team had received more than 1.8 million sign-ups for just 5,000 tickets to the event on 23 October.

To avoid a pre-sale, which she believed scalpers could exploit, the musician born Rachel Keen said the sign-up was being manually reviewed to identity a shortlist of people believed to be “real fans”.

Those fans will then receive a pre-sale link and code by email today at 11.45pm BST, with the pre-sale opening at 12pm.

Any remaining tickets will then go on general sale to the public.

The Brit Award-winning star said she had “never witnessed bots on this scale” and wanted to change the process as it was “so important” to her that fans could buy tickets at face value.

“It is a new world we are living in now, I have never witnessed bots on this scale,” she wrote, adding: “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.”

RAYE’s event, titled This Symphony May Contain Hope, will feature songs from her chart-topping second album, This Music May Contain Hope, which melded classic soul, blues and jazz influences with contemporary R&B, hip-hop and pop.

The 17-song concept album delves into themes of heartbreak, self-worth, romance and hope.

RAYE’s career has gone from strength to strength since parting ways with her record label over her frustrations at not being allowed to release her debut album.

That debut, My 21st Century Blues, was released in 2023 to critical and commercial success, peaking at No 2 in the charts and scooping six major prizes at the 2024 Brit Awards, including Album of the Year. It was also shortlisted for the 2024 Mercury Prize.

Earlier this year, RAYE scored another No 1 single – following her 2023 hit “Escapism” – with the single “Where Is My Husband!”, and headlined Reading and Leeds festival.

This followed her headline arena tour in support of her latest album. In a five-star review at the Co-Op Arena in Manchester, The Independent praised her for delivering “a lesson in musical genealogy, as RAYE traces her lineage through greats such as Billie Holiday and Ella Fitzgerald to Noughties R&B (a cover of Ja Rule and Ashanti’s ‘Always on Time’ mingles with Latin licks of acoustic guitar on ‘Flip a Switch’), and back to a swoon-worthy rendition of Kaye Ballard’s ‘Fly Me to the Moon’”.

“Her enthusiasm – some might say nerdiness – for the triumphant crash of symbols to signal a song’s climax, or a key shift (’give me a D Minor’) is infectious,” the review added. “And there’s something truly magical about witnessing 23,000 or so fans, mostly twenty- and thirty-somethings, go nuts over a trumpet riff.”