Game and concert tickets will be harder to get rid of under the new Massachusetts law

BOSTON – If you buy tickets to a concert or game in Massachusetts and suddenly can’t go, it’s going to be a lot harder to get rid of them.

Massachusetts ticket sales law

Buried in the massive economic development bill signed by Gov. Maura Healey on Wednesday is a clause that gives companies like Ticketmaster more control over who gets your tickets if you can’t make it to the event. The new law limits who fans can transfer tickets to.

Consumer watchdog groups like MASS PIGEON disagrees and says people should be able to do what they want with the tickets they’ve bought.

“I can’t resell it to anyone I want, I can’t give it to my friends or family if I can’t go and so it really hurts fans,” said Deirdre Cummings of MASSPIRG.

An executive from Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, defended the law, saying the goal is to prevent ticket scalping.

“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 intended for real fans and put them on resale markets instead , where they’re going. to double the price,” said Dan Wall, vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs for Live Nation.

This is how the new ticketing law works in Massachusetts

For example, if you buy tickets to a Boston Celtics game from Ticketmaster or SeatGeek and you can no longer go, the new law requires you to sell tickets on the original platform you bought them from, rather than on other secondary markets , as long as the company tells you about the policy first.

“Ticketmaster will buy it at a lower face value and then sell it at a higher one,” Cummings told WBZ-TV. “And that’s what keeps ticket prices high.”

Live Nation claims the new law protects artists, sports teams and fans.

“This is not about someone getting sick and not being able to go to a show,” Wall said.

The customers are not happy about it.

“If someone else wants to go to that show, they’re willing to pay the market price for it, that option is between the two consumers. Ticketmaster doesn’t have to have anything to do with it,” customer Shawn Eagle told WBZ.

“Fans and ticket holders really got the wrong end of the deal,” Cummings said.

In a statement, ticket retailer StubHub called the law anti-competitive and is calling on lawmakers to revise the language of the law.