Missouri’s Senate Approves Ticket Reselling Law

By Alfred Branch, Jr.

The Show Me State is about to show ticket brokers the money.

By the wide margin of 25-7, the state Senate late Wednesday voted to approve a measure allowing for unfettered ticket reselling, making Missouri the latest state to approve scalping this year.

The only states remaining where ticket reselling is still illegal are Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Michigan, Kentucky, North Carolina and Arkansas.

Missouri joins Connecticut, New York, Minnesota and Pennsylvania as states that have repealed their anti-scalping laws this year.

“We want to make sure the guy out there that has a couple extra tickets and has to resell them is not hauled off to jail,” the legislation’s sponsor Sen. Matt Bartle told the Missourian newspaper. “It makes no sense that we would turn people into criminals for simply wanting to resell a ticket.”. . .

With a plethora of pro and college sports teams, and several concert venues, Missouri has grappled with illegal ticket reselling for years, and like most states, the practice was generally allowed to operate in a gray or black market as authorities looked to extend resources to corral other, more serious, crimes.

Opponents to the new law argued that ticket prices would skyrocket in a free and open market, but brokers and even Ticketmaster said the practice would improve competition and lower ticket prices to consumers in a lot of instances.

“Brokers are sitting on the other side of the river in Illinois and on the other side of the river in Kansas because it is legal for them to do this business outside of the state,” Michael Naughton, vice president of finance and ticketing for the St. Louis Rams, told the Missourian. The Rams and other pro teams supported the measure because they will legally be allowed to resell tickets, too.