BOSTON – If you buy tickets to a concert or game in Massachusetts and suddenly can’t go, it becomes a lot harder to lose them.

Massachusetts ticketing law

Buried in the massive economic development bill signed by Gov. Maura Healey on Wednesday is a clause that gives companies like Ticketmaster more control over who gets your tickets if you can’t make it to the event. The new law limits who fans can transfer tickets to.

Consumer watchdog groups like MASSPIRG disagree, saying people should be able to do whatever they want with the tickets they buy.

“I can’t sell it to whoever I want, I can’t give it to my friends or family if I can’t go and so it really hurts the fans,” said MASSPIRG’s Deirdre Cummings.

An executive from Ticketmaster’s parent company, Live Nation, defended the law, saying its purpose is to prevent ticket scalping.

“The issue is whether the professional ticket brokers and the ticket resale sites that support them can use their bots and all their other tactics to grab thousands and thousands of tickets that were intended for real fans and instead place them on resale marketplaces where they’re going to double the price,” said Dan Wall, Live Nation’s vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs.

How the new ticket law works in Massachusetts

For example, if you buy tickets to a Boston Celtics game from Ticketmaster or SeatGeek and you can’t go anymore, the new law requires you to sell tickets on the original platform where you bought them, rather than on other secondary markets, as long as it company will first inform you of the policy.

“Ticketmaster will buy it at a lower face value and then sell it at a higher face value,” Cummings told WBZ-TV. “And that’s what keeps ticket prices high.”

Live Nation says the new law protects artists, sports teams and fans.

“This isn’t about someone getting sick and not being able to go to a show,” Wall said.

Customers are not happy with it.

“If someone else wants to go to that show, they are willing to pay the market rate for it. That opportunity lies between those two consumers. Ticketmaster doesn’t have to have anything to do with that,” customer Shawn Eagle told WBZ.

“Fans and ticket holders really got the wrong end of the deal,” Cummings said.

In a statement, ticket seller StubHub called the law anticompetitive and urged lawmakers to reexamine the law’s language.