Setting limits on ticket resale prices would be music to the ears
Last month, when M&T Bank Stadium hosted the first AFC Championship Game, the Baltimore Ravens might have lost, but other records were set. It was the first conference championship game in M&T’s history, and the first in Baltimore since 1971, when the Colts were the home team. It also turned out to be the most-watched AFC Championship in television history, with CBS Sports reporting more than 55 million viewers.
But here’s a less thrilling record: Some of the patrons had to pay extraordinary prices to get into the stadium, reportedly ranging from $500 for the least desirable seats to something on the order of $2,200 on average. Why? Because that’s what the so-called “secondary market,” where individuals with tickets can resell them, could command, mostly through websites created for that express purpose.
None of that surely surprised NFL football fans nor anyone else who has tried to acquire seats for sold-out events, whether at M&T or CFG Bank Arena, where tickets for big-name acts like Stevie Nicks or Beyoncé can go for thousands of dollars over face value. Think Charm City can’t attract visitors? Try telling that to starstruck concertgoers who last fall helped CFG earn a spot on Billboard’s list of “Top 10 Worldwide Highest Grossing Venues.”
But it’s one thing for season ticket holders to resell seats when they’re out of town for a Ravens or Orioles home game and quite another for individuals to scoop up as many tickets as possible and drive up prices to unaffordable levels on those secondary sites. Reasonable profit-making is fine, but gouging the public is something else altogether, and that’s why we think legislation pending before the Maryland General Assembly — to, among other things, cap resell ticket prices — deserves some serious consideration, particularly as Baltimore continues to prosper as a regional entertainment site.
The measure, Senate Bill 539 and House Bill 701, would continue to allow a resale market, of course. But it would also set up some basic consumer protections, requiring sellers to fully disclose what they paid and where the seat is located, and to limit resale prices, generally, to no more than its original price plus whatever fees and taxes the buyer spent — along with whatever a secondary market site charges for its involvement. It also specifically bans “speculative” transactions, where a middleman essentially resells tickets before they are even acquired. Those who violate these restrictions could face fines as high as $25,000 for repeat violations.
Such an approach has already drawn critics in the legislature. There are inevitably some savvy season ticket holders who have discovered that if they resell especially popular games, for example, they can profit enough to pay for a large chunk of their overall costs. The concern here is not to interfere with reasonable commerce; if seller and buyer alike are left satisfied with the transaction, it’s unlikely to provoke any enforcement action by the Maryland Attorney General’s Consumer Protection Division, anyway. Instead, it’s meant to prevent gouging that may not only sully the reputation of the website involved but of the team, concert act, venue and Baltimore generally. In this, lawmakers will need to strike a balance. But it’s clearly not happening now, at least not with reports of scalping so prevalent it crashes some of those websites.
Can we at least agree that transparency should be mandated? If consumers are willing to pay through the nose to see a big name, perhaps they are getting what they deserve. But even the wealthiest and most free-spending should know what kind of markup they’re paying.