Consumer groups worry that Massachusetts’ new ticket transfer law will hurt event attendees

“The only thing I see changing is that if you get a ticket that is non-transferable, it will be better represented,” said Sen. Barry Finegold, the lead Senate negotiator on the package. He later added, “I don’t see much change in 95 to 99% of the way ticketing is done.”

Finegold defended the portability language as a way to create clarity for buyers and limit scalpers’ ability to resell certain high-demand tickets.

“The real driving force behind this is that there have been acts like Noah Kahan, Taylor Swift (and) Billie Eilish who don’t want their ticket prices to be inflated. They want their fans to get the tickets,” he said. “You can sell them back (to the original marketplace), so it’s not like you’re stuck with the ticket, but they want to avoid marking the tickets two, three, four times.”

Representatives from MASSPIRG, the National Consumers League, Consumer Action, the Consumer Federation of America and the Sports Fan Coalition wrote to Healey on Monday, urging her to tighten ticket transfer language. They argued that the proposal would effectively “codify anti-consumer event ticketing practices into law and further entrench Live Nation Entertainment’s (LNE) monopoly over the live events industry.”

Chamber of Progress, a technology industry association, also made an unsuccessful attempt to urge Healey to reconsider ticket resale provisions.

“This language allows Live Nation to bury anti-portability provisions in terms that fans often quickly click through in their eagerness to purchase tickets to the next big event,” the group said in its own letter to Healey last week. “Worse yet, Live Nation could use ticket terms to force purchases to resell tickets exclusively on their own platform, further entrenching their monopoly position in the live events ecosystem.”

Todd O’Boyle, the organization’s senior director of technology, urged lawmakers to “fix this anti-fan wrong” when the 2025-2026 term begins.

Cummings told the State House News Service that her only concern is the language of portability, not measures calling for price transparency or a ban on the use of bots.

She added that consumer advocates had not raised the alarm about the provisions before they arrived at Healey’s desk because they had not known about them in advance. Legislative negotiators unveiled the 319-page compromise bill — which differs in some parts from the versions that originally passed the House and Senate — on the evening of November 12, and the package subsequently won House and Senate approval on November 14 .

In their letter to Healey, the consumer groups pointed to an analysis by the Sports Fan Coalition that found that Massachusetts fans saved $21 million between 2017 and 2024 by purchasing tickets on secondary markets.

“The only concern here, and that is the biggest consumer protection, is the transferability of the tickets. It has been shown that when the tickets are transferable, ticket prices generally drop because there are more options for consumers about what to do with those tickets.” Cummings said. “You bought the ticket, you should be able to do whatever you want with the ticket.”

Before Healey signed the bill, activists argued that its language would conflict with Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s position in a multi-state antitrust lawsuit with the U.S. Department of Justice she had joined against ticketing giant Live Nation.

They said the cases focus in part on “SafeTix,” a technology that prosecutors say prevents Live Nation tickets from being transferred to competing resale platforms.

The consumer groups warned that the ticket resale language in the economic development bill would “weaken the AG’s case by suggesting that Massachusetts has tacitly condoned these monopolistic practices.”

“By endorsing SafeTix’s restrictive practices through this legislation, Massachusetts would be the first state to enact a policy that effectively blesses LNE’s anticompetitive practices,” they wrote. “This would be a troubling precedent that would undermine General Campbell’s ongoing efforts to curb monopolistic behavior in the industry.”

Some other states have pursued disclosure requirements regarding ticket non-transferability, according to Finegold.

“You have to focus on the precedent and what happened,” he said. “If you talk to a lot of Noah Kahan fans, they were able to go to the shows this summer and not have to pay exorbitant prices.”