October 20, 2026
FOR YEARS, Massachusetts fans have been struggling with the cost of ticket prices to go see their favorite bands and live acts.
Now, Gov. Healey has introduced a bill in the Legislature that she claims will rein in concert pricing and save consumers money by targeting platforms that allow people to buy and sell tickets. In September, she included the bill in her $2.24 billion supplemental budget bill.
But this bill unwittingly hurts concertgoers, especially working-class fans, who often have to choose between a car payment or a rent payment, and paying for a ticket. The unintended consequences will have chilling anti-consumer effects. The very prices it’s intended to lower will actually rise, because this law gives Ticketmaster and Live Nation total control over all ticket pricing in the state.
I spent decades booking and promoting shows across the country. That’s why I know this bill has a serious flaw that will hurt the very fans it’s meant to help. By setting limits on the price when reselling a ticket on legitimate marketplaces, the law simply makes it easier for Ticketmaster to gouge fans when they try to buy a ticket online in the queue.
Sixteen years ago, Live Nation targeted me for trying to launch a music festival at the Meadowlands in New Jersey. I never struggled to schedule shows before, but once Live Nation’s threats started coming, musical acts and talent agencies stopped returning my calls. I have been locked in a lawsuit with them ever since. I’ve seen how they operate up close – which is why I support Massachusetts Attorney General Andrea Campbell’s ongoing lawsuit against their monopolistic practices.
This new bill helps Live Nation and Ticketmaster’s monopoly get even stronger. Here’s why.
Today, fans who want to go to a concert, a show, or a sporting event buy their tickets online – almost uniformly from Ticketmaster and Live Nation. If the event is sold out, or the tickets are too expensive or unattractive (sitting behind a pole at Fenway Park), fans have the option to visit one of many resale marketplaces – which are like the eBay of tickets. If there’s significant demand for an event, such as a Taylor Swift concert, the resale prices will be higher than the box office. But there are many times where buying the ticket on resale can be cheaper: it just happened in August with BTS at Gillette Stadium, where resale tickets went for as low as $8 while Ticketmaster charged more than $135.
Gov. Healey’s bill would make big changes.
The price limits will make it illegal for fans to buy and sell tickets at the best price. This change will backfire, because you can cap prices, but you can’t put a limit on how badly fans want to see a show. That will push ticket sales to social media or to the parking lot behind a venue, where fraud is rampant. Fans face the unfair choice of taking a gamble on the black market or missing out on the once-in-a-lifetime experience of seeing their favorite artist live.
Ticketmaster and Live Nation already control the venues and ticket sales almost everywhere – an estimated 86 percent of the concert market runs through their monopoly. Gov. Healey’s bill places no restrictions on them. That means Ticketmaster and Live Nation are free to continue using unfair and deceptive tactics that hurt fans, like dynamic pricing. Dynamic pricing is happening across industries – where the price increases on people when they’re literally trying to complete a purchase. It’s wrong, and should be outlawed.
The US Senate has been investigating Ticketmaster and Live Nation’s unfair practices, and their report from March points to one example in 2021 when Ticketmaster used their dynamic ticket pricing technique on fans who wanted to see Morgan Wallen – it delivered a 94 percent revenue jump. From 2019 to 2022, Ticketmaster saw a 700 percent increase in revenue on dynamically priced tickets.
The resale price caps would also still allow Ticketmaster to hold back tickets from the general public. The strategy is as simple as it is underhanded: Ticketmaster can declare a show is “sold out,” dramatically increasing demand, and then release more seats that were held back as “platinum” tickets at exorbitant prices. It’s the purest form of price gouging—and completely legal under Gov. Healey’s bill. New Jersey Congresswoman Nellie Pou’s HOLDBACKS Act is commonsense legislation that would tackle this hidden ticket inventory.
Gov. Healey’s bill would pour gasoline on an already raging fire.
So how should this legislation be crafted to actually help working families? It should target Ticketmaster’s predatory pricing approach, while putting reasonable guardrails on the legitimate resale market – not wiping it out entirely.
For about half of live events, fans can get tickets on resale at prices that are lower than what they’re charged at the box office. This bill would gut that market in Massachusetts. Ticketmaster wins. Fans lose.
This bill also hurts smaller artists trying to launch their careers and the small, independent venues they play at. Most of us know about the high prices to see Noah Kahan, Bruce Springsteen, and Taylor Swift. But there are an estimated 250,000 artists pursuing music professionally, playing shows at thousands of small independent venues around the country. Cheaper resale tickets fill empty seats, bringing in more fans who buy drinks, purchase merchandise, and come back for future shows. An empty seat does nothing for anyone.
There are so many working-class fans who buy concert tickets and keep this industry running. I now do door-to-door outreach in Massachusetts, talking to Uber drivers, Dunkin’ workers, construction workers, parents just trying to take their kids to a show. They hate dynamic pricing and can only afford tickets by waiting for resale prices to drop.
Fans need more choices, not fewer, to lower prices. They need platforms they can actually understand.
When Live Nation and Ticketmaster sought approval for their merger, their executives told the US Senate it would benefit consumers and wouldn’t raise prices or harm competition. We know how that turned out. Earlier this year, a federal jury found that Ticketmaster violated state and federal antitrust laws in operating as a monopoly.
We should be fighting against that market domination, not enacting legislation that further enables it.
Tommy Dorfman is the founder of Juice Entertainment and a former concert and nightclub promoter.
Courtesy of Commonwealth Beacon
