Legislation poised to hand over unprecedented new power to Ticketmaster and other primary ticket marketplaces over consumer choice is being flown through the Massachusetts legislature this week. The Live Nation wish list language is included in part of a larger economic development bill in the state, and is expected to be voted on by the end of the day on Thursday, having only been released late on Tuesday for review.
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While the version of the bill passed by the house included robust consumer ticket rights protections that would bring Massachusetts in line with states like neighbors Connecticut and New York, the version released out of conference committee this week shreds those protections, explicitly granting permission for companies like Ticketmaster to use restrictive mobile-only ticketing systems .
Consumer advocates were taken aback by the dramatic shift in favor of a regulatory landscape for tickets that enables nearly universal control of sale and resale to be put in place by companies like Live Nation and its powerful allies in artist management like Irving Azoff and Corin Capshaw as well as sports organizations.
“Lawmakers had the opportunity to protect a consumer’s right to transfer their ticket but instead chose to codify a monopoly’s business model into law,” says Brian Hess of the Sports Fans Coalition, which has long lobbied for consumer ticket transfer rights such as the ones proposed in the House version in Massachusetts.
In the House bill, ticketing companies would have required that consumers be given the choice of ticket format at the time of purchase. Mobile-locked applications such as Ticketmaster’s “SafeTix” would only be allowed if alternative options like traditional tickets that can’t be locked down by the event organizer were also available at the time of purchase. It also would have banned the charging of add-on fees for transferable ticket formats.
In its place, the conference committee inserted language that effectively allows for any and all restrictions on ticket transfer to be put in place, so long as they are prominently disclosed to the consumer before purchase.
Notably, the Senate bill passed did not have any language related to consumer rights related to ticket transfer at all. Despite that, the six members of the conference committee – representatives Aaron Michlewitz, Jerry Parisella and Dave Muradian, and senators Barry Finegold, Mike Rodrigues and Peter Durant – altered the section on ticket transferability dramatically. This alteration moves the proposed regulations in a fashion that fits precisely Live Nation Entertainment’s preferred regulatory climate, where they and other event promoters and ticketing companies can effectively declare their own competition illegal.
TicketNews contacted each of the six members of the committee via email on Wednesday afternoon, asking for explanation on how they approached changing the transfer language. None have responded as of the time of publication.
Consumer advocates have long argued in favor of consumer protections against the forced imposition of paperless or transfer-restricted applications systems due to the fact that they are regularly used to enable policies that:
- restrict fans from selling their tickets at more than face value while simultaneously giving venues the ability to restrict fans from selling their tickets for less than face value
- giving venues the right to force consumers to give personally identifiable information and sell that information to on line marketers through the usage of their mobile applications systems which require opt-in for such data harvesting
Less than a year ago, the user data of hundreds of millions of Ticketmaster users was confirmed to be hacked and available for purchase on the dark web. Since that time, there have been widespread reports of consumer tickets disappearing from their account, transferred out without permission by someone who had accessed the account, presumably using information gained from that from the Ticketmaster accounts, and reappear on the internet for sale.
Research published by the Sports Fans Coalition shows that consumers regularly save money on tickets purchased through resale marketplaces vs. the original face value. A recent report showed that consumers have saved $351 million since 2017 on sports tickets on resale marketplaces, and states with ticket transfer protected by law see significantly higher savings than states without such protections.
That same report shows that Massachusetts consumers have saved more than $21 million on tickets purchased through resale marketplaces during that timeframe, despite not having legal protection on transferability. But a shift to explicit, codified permission for transfer restrictions will almost certainly have a dramatic impact on that, if the proposed language survives this week’s votes and is not challenged by the Governor before signed into law.
The last-second u-turn by legislators in favor of music industry priorities vs. consumer protection mirrors a similar dramatic shift that took place during the work towards ticket reform in Colorado in the last three years. In that state, a pro-consumer bill that would have enshrined consumer transfer rights into law was amended so dramatically in favor of Live Nation’s preferences that Governor Jared Polis vetoed the bill, sending it back for more work before it passed a year later.
It also marks a dramatic shift existing work done by the Massachusetts executive branch to protect consumer’s rights in the ticketing industry. Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell is one of the many states Attorneys General who have signed on as co-plaintiffs with the Department of Justice in a sprawling antitrust lawsuit aimed at breaking up what they characterize as an illegal monopoly.
“Our lawsuit today alleges that Live Nation’s anticompetitive conduct not only violates the law, but stifles innovation, including by forcing venues to solely use Ticketmaster or strategically acquiring venues in order to eliminate competition,” said AG Campbell in a statement when the lawsuit was filed earlier this year.
SafeTix – the primary “paperless” system in use across the country for any Live Nation venue or event ticketed by Ticketmaster – was specifically called out by the DOJ as a tool designed to harm competition and extend its alleged monopoly into ticket resale.
Now, the state legislature is poised to codify the right of companies like Ticketmaster to extend their alleged monopoly into resale marketplaces as well. A representative of Attorney General Campbell’s office declined to comment for this story.
With just hours before the bill is due for a simple up or down vote by the Senate, there is very little that can be done to change the trajectory of this new power that event operators and companies like Ticketmaster are about to be handed by the conference committee’s six members. The Senate cannot offer any further amendments to this bill at this time.
Massachusetts consumers’ primary hope in avoiding the bill to come to fruition as currently written likely comes from Governor Maura Healey. While it is almost certain that she would not veto a massive economic development bill the way that Colorado’s Governor was able to do with the specific ticketing bill that crossed his desk, there is another path in Massachusetts.
Gov. Healey would have the option, if the Senate passes this bill as written, to send it back to the Senate with an amendment altering the specific sections deemed worthy of alteration. So in theory, Governor Healey could see fit to override the will of the conference committee and restore the House language on transferability, which could then make it in to the final bill.
Otherwise, consumers in Massachusetts are about to be a first national test case in what Live Nation and other event organizers are willing to do with explicit legal rights to exclude their competition.
