Ticket sales for recent UK shows by RAYE and Sam Fender have been disrupted by suspected automated activity, renewing calls for stronger protections against ticket touting and increasingly sophisticated bots.
RAYE said on Instagram on Oct. 13 that her one-off Royal Albert Hall performance on Oct. 23 had received 1.8 million registrations for a venue with 5,000 seats. She said hundreds of thousands of registrations were fake and attributed the disruption to AI bots. Her team reviewed the registrations to help ensure tickets went to genuine fans.
A presale for Sam Fender’s Proper Massive stadium tour, scheduled for June 2027 in the UK and Ireland, was also affected by what the singer described as a “sophisticated bot attack” on ticketing site Gigantic. The presale was delayed by 24 hours. Gigantic said it had detected an unusually high volume of suspicious activity and was working to make ticket purchases fair.
The incidents have highlighted pressure on ticketing systems as demand for live music grows. The Royal Albert Hall told Billboard UK that it routinely blocks millions of bot requests, including more than 38 million in a single 24-hour period. Ticketmaster UK managing director Sarah Slater said the company faces more than 200 million bot attempts each day.
Industry figures say the problem predates AI, but that advancing technology has made attacks more sophisticated. Adam Webb of campaign group FanFair Alliance said touts have targeted ticketing systems for two decades. An artist manager, speaking anonymously to Billboard UK, said bots had bought 15% to 20% of one artist’s tour-date tickets, many of which later appeared on resale sites.
Artists and their teams are increasingly having to intervene when sales go wrong. Adam Maestro of resale platform Tixel said RAYE and Fender were forced to review registrations and delay sales to address problems they did not cause. United Talent Agency partner Jules de Lattre said fans’ concerns extend beyond bots to resale, ticket allocation, premium standing areas and complex pricing.
The UK government has pledged to cap resale prices for tickets to major cultural events at face value. However, the legislation remains in development and is not expected to feature in the parliamentary session running until May 2027. Some industry figures argue that a resale cap could reduce the financial incentive for large-scale touting, while opponents, including Viagogo, StubHub and UK Finance, warn that restrictions could push buyers toward less protected channels.
Ticketing companies and artists are also testing other approaches. DICE says its tickets cannot be resold outside its app, where sold-out-event waitlists are capped at face value. For Oasis’ 2027 shows, access to ticket sales was managed through a ballot and sales were spread across three days; fans reported shorter queues and clearer prices.
Some industry voices have called for identity verification, while de Lattre cautioned that existing measures such as purchase limits, CAPTCHA challenges, bot detection and virtual waiting rooms are not foolproof. He said safeguards should not make the process so difficult that genuine fans are discouraged from buying tickets. Industry figures broadly agree that stronger systems and enforcement are needed, though they differ on which measures will best protect fans.
Sources: Billboard.