Customers in Massachusetts Unhappy About New Ticket Law

Massachusetts governor Maura Healey recently signed a massive Economic Development Bill into law. But the bill contains a clause that allows companies like Ticketmaster more control over secondary ticketing sales. Here's the latest.

Executives from Live Nation have defended the law, stating that the goal is to prevent ticket scalping at major live events. “It's about whether the professional ticket brokers and the ticket resale sites that support them can use their bots and all their other tactics to grab thousands and thousands of tickets that were meant for real fans and instead put them on resale markets where they're going to double the price,” Dan Wall, Vice President of Corporate and Regulatory Affairs for Live Nation told CBS News.

The new law in Massachusetts works like this. If you buy tickets to a game or live music concert from Ticketmaster that you can no longer attend, the new law requires customers to resell the tickets on the original platform on which they were purchased. “Ticketmaster will buy it at a lower face value and then sell it at a higher one,” Dierdre Cummings of consumer watchdog group MASSPIRG told WBZ-TV. “And so that's what keeps the ticket prices elevated.”

But Live Nation refutes this thinking. “This is not about a person who gets sick and can't go to a show,” Wall says. Ticket reseller StubHub has called the law anti-competitive in favor of Ticketmaster and Live Nation and say they're urging lawmakers to revisit the language of the law to prevent a ticket selling monopoly in the state.

The Massachusetts bill comes just six months after the US Department of Justice announced an anti-trust case investigating Live Nation's use of Ticketmaster to undermine competition in the live music industry.

“Massachusetts joined the federal anti-trust suit against Live Nation—but now it's opening the door for Live Nation to strengthen its monopoly by cutting off the transfer of tickets,” says Chamber of Progress Senior Director of Technology Policy Todd O'Boyle. “Bay Staters are some of the most dedicated sports fans, but this will make it harder for families to support the Red Sox at Fenway. When the General Court reconvenes in 2025—they should fix this anti-fan mistake.”