Concert ticket prices are out of control. But is capping resale prices a solution?

As long as demand outstrips supply, some fans are always going to be left standing outside.

People observed the crowd at a Noah Kahan concert while outside Fenway Park in Boston on July 11. Christian Kantosky for The Boston Globe

British singer-songwriter Olivia Dean is coming to Boston next week, fresh off of her Grammy for best new artist. If you don’t already have a ticket, get ready to open up your wallet. It’ll cost you $300 just to get in the building for nosebleed seats.

Excuse the pun, but this has become a broken record for hot concert tickets.

In July, my 15-year-old daughter desperately wanted to see the folk-pop star Noah Kahan at Fenway Park — the cheapest tickets on the resale market were $600. Thinking I would show my ingenuity, I told my daughter we’d go to Fenway, then scoop up tickets from online resellers desperate to unload as showtime approached. I couldn’t have played things worse: Tickets shot up to $20,000.

“Enough is enough,” I say, and, much more importantly, said Governor Maura Healey. In July, she introduced an act to combat resellers who have “driven up the cost to outrageous levels.”

Healey’s “Great Divide Act,” named for Kahan’s latest album, would limit service fees, ban the sale of speculative tickets a seller doesn’t yet possess, and cap resale ticket prices at 110 percent of the original ticket price — meaning a $100 ticket could only fetch $110 on reseller markets such as StubHub, SeatGeek, or Vivid Seats.

Sounds great. The problem is, I’m not sure the plan will work. If ticket holders can’t charge what the market will bear, they’ll undoubtedly sell their seats on the black market.

The legislation has industry support. Don Law, chairman of Live Nation New England, said via email that the “real issues” with ticketing come from “predatory resale sites and scalpers who scam fans and siphon millions from the live event experience while contributing nothing back.”

For concerts like Noah Kahan, Ticketmaster, which is owned by Live Nation, set up its “face value exchange”: If you can’t go to the show and wish to sell your tickets, you must sell them back through their platform at face value. Of course, sellers looking to make a buck disregard the rules.

I don’t like resellers trying to gouge me, but I do like some ticket reselling platforms, like StubHub. For a Red Sox game on a weeknight, it’s great. I choose where I want to sit and how much I’m willing to pay — easy, convenient, transparent. If I want to splurge for a special occasion, the secondary market gives me access to seats I could’ve never dreamed of.

The resellers argue that price caps will push sales that once went through platforms like StubHub onto the digital street corners — places like Facebook Marketplace, X, or Craigslist.

“We’ve seen in other markets, [a price cap] could fuel a shadow market,” said Brian Berry, executive director of Ticket Policy Forum, which represents resellers.

Ireland and the state of Victoria, Australia, implemented secondary market price caps and cases of ticket fraud spiked.

Let’s take a quick detour back to the 1980s. When I was a kid, my dad and I would go to sold-out San Francisco 49ers games and deal with the guys on the streets. Scalpers would badger you. Sometimes you’d buy tickets only to come across a guy 10 seconds later offering a better deal. And then the worst-case scenario: counterfeits. Fraud happens in the digital age, too, but with the guys on the streets there was no digital evidence.

I don’t want to return to those unregulated, opaque days, this time online. And I worry that regulation without strict enforcement could take us back there.

And look, if somebody loves Taylor Swift so much that they’re willing to shell out a month’s rent to see her, is that StubHub’s fault?

Concert promoters also bear some blame for astronomical ticket prices. Live Nation and Ticketmaster are running a monopoly, according to a federal jury in April. Ticket prices have been soaring well before they hit the resale market and often sell out in minutes. So, many of us are left to take our chances on the secondary market.

That’s what happened to my daughter and me, along with thousands of others, at Fenway this summer. But you know what? The concert turned out to be one of the coolest I’ve ever (not) been to. We band of ticketless brothers and sisters stood on Landsdowne Street on a hot summer night listening to Kahan quite clearly. It was an unforgettable, unique experience.

But deep down, we all knew we’d have rather been inside.

I’m glad the governor is bringing attention to this situation. I’m just saying her idea may not work as cleanly as hoped. As long as demand outstrips supply, some of us are always going to be left standing outside.