Since the mid-19th century, London’s iconic Royal Albert Hall has catered to discerning fans of pop and classical music over thousands of events. But when RAYE announced an intimate one-off show at the venue for Oct. 23, demand reached unprecedented levels — or so she thought.
Writing on her Instagram on Oct. 13, the British star revealed that she had received 1.8 million registrations for the 5,000-capacity show, claiming that “AI bots” had disrupted the sale. She said that “hundreds of thousands of fake registrations” had been made for the presale process, which required fans to pre-register for a potential code to buy tickets. “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.” In the end, her team had to go through and review each registration themselves to ensure tickets went into the hands of real fans.
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Last week (Oct. 21), Sam Fender experienced similar when a presale for his Proper Massive stadium tour in the U.K. and Ireland in June 2027 was impacted by a “sophisticated bot attack” on the ticketing site Gigantic. As a result, the presale was moved by 24 hours to ensure “real fans get the tickets,” Fender wrote on his Instagram. Gigantic said that there was an “unusually high volume of suspicious activity” and that “fans should be able to buy tickets fairly, and that is what we’re working to make sure happens.”
Live music and ticketing are now the latest AI battleground, where bots are able to consume show onsales in effort to get tickets. Spending on music tourism in the U.K. for live music and festivals reached £11.2 billion ($15.04 billion), according to a recent report from U.K. Music, with 24.7 million music tourists, both domestic and foreign, attending events in 2025.
The issues arise amid growing demand for the U.K. government to take control of the situation. In its 2024 election manifesto, the Labour Party pledged to cap the resale of tickets for large cultural events in music, sports and beyond at face value, effectively wiping out the secondary ticket market where passes for major events are sold for vast sums. Artists such as The Cure, Ed Sheeran, Dua Lipa, Radiohead and more have all backed the move and it is considered personally important to Prime Minister Andy Burnham.
Two years on, however, and the changes are still some way off. In May, the industry reacted with dismay when the legislation was announced to still be in the draft phase and would not feature in the upcoming parliamentary session, which runs until May 2027. Last month, The Guardian reported that a bill was being drafted to help combat the risk that touts could buy from abroad to avoid the ban. Similar bans have been enacted in France, Belgium and Ireland.
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For many in the industry, these recent developments have felt inevitable, and the pace of technological innovation has outstripped the current models of ticket-buying for fans. “Unfortunately, I don’t think there’s necessarily anything new here,” Adam Webb, campaign manager of lobby group FanFair Alliance, tells Billboard U.K. “For the past two decades, as the so-called secondary market has evolved, touts have abused technology to attack ticketing systems. As technology advances, those attacks get more sophisticated.”
Jules de Lattre, partner and music agent at United Talent Agency (UTA), says that “fans are increasingly frustrated by the experience of buying tickets.” He adds, “The issue isn’t a lack of demand for live music, it’s a growing sense that the ticket-buying experience is becoming more expensive, complicated and, in some cases, unfair.”
de Lattre continues: “We’re seeing this frustration play out in different ways, from concerns about bots, touting and the fairness of ticket allocation to growing resistance toward premium standing areas and increasingly complex pricing structures. Fans aren’t necessarily opposed to paying more for a great live experience, but they want to feel they’re being treated fairly and that the price reflects genuine value.”
The fear of bots is shared by one artist manager, whose clients include arena- and theater-headlining acts and spoke to Billboard U.K. under the condition of anonymity. They point to the ongoing, well-documented issues in the U.S. over the past decade and say that the U.K. is now facing “a supercharged version coming in with AI.” For one of their artist’s shows, bots purchased up “15% to 20%” of a tour date, many of which ended up on secondary ticket markets.
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As bots continue to grow more sophisticated and are developed and trained by AI, even if scalped tickets are canceled by promoters, there’s a chance that they could be hovered up by the same bots and bought all over again. “You’re now put in a position where the promoters see it as a thankless task canceling them all the time. You’ve got fees and ticketing sites driving up the cost of shows. You’ve got a worse consumer experience. You’ve got a potential for people to not have fans at their show. I mean, it’s just a lose-lose for everyone except for the tout.”
A negative fan experience, Webb adds, could start turning fans away from live music altogether. “That would be my worry. Without fans, there isn’t a music business,” he says. Adam Maestro, head of commercial at Tixel UK/EU, a secondary ticket site that caps sales at face value, says that artists like Fender and RAYE “are forced to step in to clean up a mess they didn’t make. Hand-checking registrations, delaying onsales, pulling ticket tiers, publicly calling out platforms over inflated resale prices, because ultimately it’s the artist’s name on the ticket and their relationship with their fans on the line.”
The pressure that ticket sites are facing right now is immense. A spokesperson for the Royal Albert Hall told Billboard U.K. that they routinely block millions of bot requests to access the site during ticket sales. In one 24-hour period, separate from the recent RAYE sale, they say that they received “more than 38 million bot requests in a single 24-hour period.” They continue, “Despite these measures, we regularly see tickets advertised at vastly inflated prices, sometimes by sellers who don’t even possess them. We’ve seen the distress this causes when fans arrive at the Hall with invalid tickets.”
Sarah Slater, managing director of Ticketmaster U.K., said the company faces upward of “200 million bot attempts every single day.” In 2018, Ticketmaster voluntarily capped resale at face value on its site, but “the problem is that touts can still make huge profits on other sites,” she says.
Maestro adds, “Bots succeed by staying one step ahead of the technology, and AI is just their latest edge in scooping up tickets before real fans. It means anyone running a ticketing platform has to work just as hard in the other direction, using every available tool, including AI, to stay in front of them.”
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Many across the sector see the potential ticket ban as a necessity, one that will remove the incentive for ticket touts to even get in the mix. Speaking at SXSW London in June, Alex Hill, AEG International’s chief executive and president, said that “as an industry we’d like to work quicker than the regulator at the moment” and that a number of “bad actors, such as bots and touts” are undermining consumer faith in the ticket buying process.
In theory, by reducing the incentive to harvest tickets for resale at a premium, the market for secondary tickets will be a fairer one for fans. Ticket agency DICE was an early adopter of mobile-first ticketing and passes, and put fair sale practices at the heart of its mission when it launched in 2014. “We created mobile-first, dynamic ticket technology that makes touting structurally impossible — DICE tickets can’t be sold on the secondary market outside of the app,” Simon Kempner, chief operating officer, tells Billboard U.K.
On DICE, fans can join waitlists for sold-out events, which are capped at face value and sold exclusively through their app. “This means that tickets get into the hands of real fans, and revenue goes to artists instead of touts.” Even then, he says, “bad actors looking to exploit that demand” are attempting to disrupt the process.
While the government continues its drafting process for the legislation, the industry is being forced to take the lead. Following the debacle for tickets to Oasis’ 2025 reunion tour — which saw stagnant queues and unclear pricing — the band switched things up for their next round of shows, set to take place in June 2027 in Europe and North America. Hopefuls wanting to buy tickets had to enter a ballot for a ticket sale access code; a code did not guarantee a pair of tickets but provided access to the ticket sales, which were spread across three different days. Fans reported a much smoother experience with shorter queues and clearer prices.
There are calls for stricter enforcement and verification for hopefuls trying to purchase tickets. Writing on LinkedIn, recent Billboard U.K. 40 Under 40 honoree Michael Adex, chief executive of talent agency Northern Quarter, said that “the only real solution is ID verification.” He added: “From a ticketing perspective, I think having people use a valid ID is the way forward. Verify against that and you eliminate the bots overnight. It sounds like a big step but, unless I’m missing something, it’s the only one that actually solves the problem.” The government has already rolled out ID verification for pornography sites in the U.K. and will enable it next spring when a social media ban for under-16s comes into practice.
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de Lattre says that while the industry has utilized a number of deterrents — such as purchase limits, CAPTCHA challenges, automatic bot detection and virtual waiting rooms — “none of these measures are foolproof and we need to avoid making the process so complicated that genuine fans are discouraged from participating.” Ultimately, the tech infrastructure needs to be more robust and artist teams and ticketing companies now take on much bigger remits to anticipate issues for clients and create clear plans of action when something goes awry.
A resale cap has been opposed by sites such as Viagogo and StubHub, and by U.K. Finance, a trade body that represents over 300 institutions in the U.K., including NatWest, HSBC and Barclays. They say that moving fans from regulated spaces such as Viagogo — which refunds fans for fake tickets bought on its platform — to places such as Facebook Marketplace or WhatsApp means fewer protections for purchasers and creates a black market. UK Finance says it “will expose consumers to not only the financial burden of being a victim of fraud, but also the emotional harm of being defrauded.”
de Lattre also says that the picture is somewhat skewed by issues on major tours, when the majority of smaller shows at the theater level and below often go smoothly. “Demand may remain extremely strong at the top, but we shouldn’t confuse commercial success today with a guarantee of long-term consumer confidence,” he says. The ticket resale ban is “part of the solution, rather than a silver bullet,” de Lattre adds, saying that proper penalties and implementation “could significantly reduce the incentive for industrial-scale touting and help restore some confidence in the ticketing system.”
Wherever the legislation ends up landing, the anonymous artist manager tells Billboard U.K. that the current model isn’t working and that the ticket buying experience isn’t leaving a positive memory for the artists or their fans.
“It’s pretty disheartening to be honest,” the manager concludes. “You do everything you can, and you’re trying to protect your artists and give them answers. But how do you explain the unexplainable and tell them that there’s no solution?”
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