Hours before BTS was due to take the stage at Gillette Stadium on Wednesday, the cheapest tickets showing up on independent resale marketplaces had fallen to less than $30. Ticketmaster’s lowest visible primary ticket for the same show was $135.20 including fees.
The gap was plain across the listings fans were likely checking first. StubHub showed Wednesday tickets beginning at $20 including fees, SeatGeek’s all-in minimum was $24, and Ticket Club listed member pricing as low as $16. Ticketmaster, by contrast, showed Standard Admission and Preferred Seating offers for Wednesday but no Ticketmaster Verified Resale inventory alongside them.
SeatGeek’s page alone showed more than 1,700 listings for the Wednesday performance, a sign of how much inventory had piled up even as the official ticket seller stayed well above the resale floor. On the same night, the cheapest independent offers were roughly 82% to 88% below Ticketmaster’s baseline primary price, depending on which marketplace was used.
Thursday’s second Foxborough show carried the same pattern, though the numbers were less extreme. Ticketmaster’s lowest price was $98.95, while StubHub, SeatGeek and Ticket Club all showed comparable upper-level seats between $25 and $37. SeatGeek listed a ticket one row away in Section 304 for $36 including fees, compared with Ticketmaster’s standard-admission ticket in Section 304, Row 19 at $98.95.
That split is exactly the kind of market behavior Massachusetts lawmakers are weighing as they consider Amendment 20. The proposal would generally prevent concert tickets from being resold for more than 110% of their original price, excluding secondary service fees, but it would leave primary sellers free to keep setting the opening price. Sporting events are exempt, and artists or venues could still authorize higher resale prices in writing.
There is also an unresolved question inside the listings themselves: Ticketmaster showed no Verified Resale inventory for the Gillette Stadium concerts, but the available facts do not identify whether the venue or the promoter disabled it. What is clear is that the cheapest seats for fans were being set by independent exchanges, while the official platform stayed far above them. If lawmakers move ahead, the burden would fall on the resale market first, not on the primary sellers who still control the initial price.
