Not being a sports fan or in the market for big-ticket arena concerts, I’ve never had much occasion to consider searching for resold event tickets. As such, I’ve always had mixed feelings about scalping laws. I could understand the economic logic that pointed out that such laws are a futile attempt to create an artificially low market price and hence just act to enforce a lottery. Then again, a lottery is ultimately what bands and concert promoters want: concerts attended only by those with the wealth for fifty, eighty, or even two-hundred dollar tickets are going to fail in the larger task of creating an ongoing fanbase of ordinary people who will buy albums. Witness the big-ticket acts that are starting to charge those prices: they’re well-established acts, with an already devoted, generally older, fanbase. I think maintaining a ticket lottery is best achieved by non-legislative ends, whether by limits and restrictions on ticket purchasing through Ticketmaster or by fans-only tie-ins with artists’ websites. Still, since as a not-well-to-do music fan I tend to benefit from a ticket-lottery system, I’m never all that bothered by scalping laws.
Only a recent consideration of buying resold tickets made me wonder if such laws make sense as they stand. Seeing that Guided by Voices is having their final tour — and lamenting the fact that somehow I’ve never managed to see them live — I decided to get tickets, but too late in the game; they had sold out quickly. Now, given budget constraints and priorities, I’m not really willing to pay all that much more than face value of the tickets, so I figured that I wouldn’t bother with a scalped ticket. Still, might as well check eBay, I thought.
It was there that I realized an odd situation: as a Massachusetts resident, I’m forbidden from bidding more than $2 above face value, and any in-state seller is forbidden from asking/receiving more than that. But out-of-state sellers can ask more, and out-of-state buyers can bid more. Therefore, if the market price climbs above face value, I or any state resident is out of the game. Of course there are geographical limitations on this — namely, the distance that people travel for shows — but given the proximity of New Hampshire, Rhode Island et al., these limitations might serve to drive down market price on eBay but not affect the disqualification of Massachusetts residents from the resale market.
I realize that a state’s laws don’t apply outside its borders. But given the increased interstate reach of ticketmaster and other online ticket sellers, a state-specific scalping law will make less and less sense.
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