California Ticketing Bill Heads to Final Vote With New Holdback Carve-Out and Venue Coalition Revolt

A California ticketing bill that began the year with strong backing from independent venues and music-industry groups is heading into the Legislature’s final day with many of those same organizations urging lawmakers to kill it — and with newly added language expressly protecting some primary-market ticket holdbacks.

Assembly Bill 1349, introduced by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan, is scheduled for final Senate consideration Monday after lawmakers amended it again late Friday rather than taking an expected floor vote.

The August 28 changes create explicit protections for certain tickets withheld by rights holders and venue operators, along with a particularly broad safe harbor allowing California professional sports organizations to withhold and manage ticket inventory for business purposes. Those provisions now sit alongside a central feature of the bill restricting unaffiliated sellers from advertising or marketing tickets they do not yet possess or have authorization to sell.

At the same time, the National Independent Venue Association and a coalition of 28 music, labor, venue and consumer organizations are calling on both senators and Assemblymembers to vote against the legislation.

It is a dramatic reversal for NIVA, which in March said it was “proud to help architect” AB 1349 and companion bill AB 1720, describing the measures together as a potentially national model for ticketing regulation. NIVA California was also a formal sponsor of AB 1349 and continued testifying in support of the bill as recently as its Senate committee hearings this summer.

Its change of position comes after AB 1720, which would have capped most covered ticket resales at 10% above their original price, was held by Senate Appropriations on August 13 and effectively ended for the session.

Bill Now Draws a Line Around Unreleased Inventory

After starting its live as a strongly one-sided bill aimed at making unlawful a broad array of market practices specifically targeting ticket resale, AB 1349 had been reshaped into a broader, behavior-based regulatory package designed to limit the sale of “speculative” tickets. The Senate-rewritten AB 1349 retains a prohibition on speculative ticket sales, defined broadly to include advertising, listing, marketing or accepting payment for tickets when the seller lacks either actual or “constructive” possession.

To establish constructive possession, the seller must have fully paid for the ticket, hold a legally enforceable right to receive it and have received confirmation of the purchase or assignment. A seller can alternatively list a ticket when authorized by the event presenter or venue operator.

The bill separately prohibits a ticket seller from marketing a ticket before it has been made available by the event presenter, venue, rights holder or original seller unless the seller has authorization or constructive possession.

But an exemption added August 28 creates a different rule for specified primary-market inventory.

New Section 22502.1(e) says those speculative-ticket restrictions do not apply to the marketing, advertising or sale of season-ticket packages, multigame packages, playoff packages or “inventory withheld at the sole discretion of the rights holder or venue operator” when handled by the rights holder or its authorized ticketing agent before the applicable season.

That does not amount to a blanket legalization of every possible ticket holdback. But it does put an explicit statutory boundary around the practice: defined inventory intentionally withheld by the party controlling the tickets can be protected, while an unaffiliated seller generally cannot market that unreleased inventory unless it has authorization or an enforceable right to receive the ticket.

The August 28 amendments go considerably further for professional sports.

A new subsection of Section 22505.5 says nothing in California’s ticketing chapter can be interpreted to prohibit, restrict or impose liability on a California professional sports team, sports venue operator or qualifying league-owned entity for “withholding, reserving, managing, transferring, or allocating ticket inventory for operational or business purposes.”

The provision is significant because ticket holdbacks have long been one of the least transparent parts of the primary ticket market. Artists, teams, promoters, venues, sponsors and other parties routinely reserve portions of event inventory rather than making every seat available during the public onsale.

TicketNews examined that practice earlier this month, including the tension between legitimate artist holds used for discounted fan programs and undisclosed inventory practices that can leave consumers with little idea how many tickets actually exist or may become available later.

AB 1349 does prohibit misleading claims that an event is sold out when tickets remain available through the original or an authorized seller. It does not, however, establish the broader advance holdback-disclosure regime sought in other ticketing proposals.

Original Sponsors Now Say Vote No

NIVA and its allies are attacking the final bill from a different direction.

The coalition argues that the Senate rewrite creates excessive liability for independent venues and promoters, changes the treatment of some primary-market ticket transactions, removed earlier affirmative seat-and-row disclosure provisions and fails to impose sufficient responsibility on resale marketplaces for speculative listings.

Some of that framing goes further than the statutory text.

While the definition of a speculative ticket sale excludes a “ticket resale marketplace” from the seller-level prohibition, AB 1349 separately states that a resale marketplace may not knowingly or recklessly advertise, list, process payment for or otherwise facilitate a speculative sale. Marketplaces would also have to maintain “reasonable measures” designed to prevent such transactions on their platforms.

Nevertheless, the coalition that helped push AB 1349 through the Legislature now argues the rewritten measure is worse than allowing the session to end without it.

That reversal comes only weeks after the other half of NIVA’s preferred California package collapsed.

AB 1720 would have imposed a 10% resale price ceiling — a policy NIVA and its Fix the Tix allies have made a centerpiece of their national campaign. Senate lawmakers repeatedly raised questions about the proposal’s costs, competition effects and whether limiting the price at which consumers can resell tickets would meaningfully address high original ticket prices before Appropriations left the measure on its suspense file.

Just six months ago, NIVA described AB 1720 and AB 1349 as complementary reforms that together would establish a new standard for California ticketing.

A Familiar Fight Over Narrower Reform

The last-minute California reversal also has a precedent at the federal level.

NIVA and related industry groups publicly supported the bipartisan TICKET Act as it moved through Congress, only for TicketNews to report in December 2024 that NIVA affiliates were lobbying lawmakers to remove the legislation from a year-end government funding package as it approached passage.

Sources familiar with that campaign told TicketNews at the time that the groups hoped instead to get another opportunity to pursue the broader ticketing restrictions favored by Fix the Tix and supporters of the industry-backed FAIR Ticketing proposals.

The same policy divide resurfaced this year. Fix the Tix pressed senators to rewrite the current TICKET Act by adding a resale price ceiling, tighter resale-fee restrictions and a speculative-ticket prohibition without the exceptions contained in the compromise legislation.

That history does not establish why NIVA decided to abandon AB 1349 in California. But it provides relevant context for a second late-stage fight in which venue and music-industry groups that had supported a ticketing measure ultimately opposed the narrower framework once lawmakers declined to adopt the more extensive restrictions on resale the coalition had sought.

In California, that leaves an unusual final-day alignment.

The resale price cap is dead. AB 1349 has lost much of the broader language that drew objections from resale marketplaces and competition advocates earlier in the session. Rights holders have now received explicit protections for specified withheld inventory, with professional sports getting an even broader inventory-management safe harbor.

And the organizations that once celebrated AB 1349 as legislation they helped design are now telling lawmakers to vote no.

AB 1349 passed the Assembly 66-0 in January but has since been substantially rewritten in the Senate. The Senate approved the measure unanimously through its three policy committees and Appropriations before the latest floor amendments.

The official legislative history shows it was read for a second time Sunday and ordered back to third reading. If senators approve the amended bill Monday, it must return to the Assembly for concurrence because the version now before the Senate differs materially from the one Assemblymembers approved in January.

August 31 is the final day for either chamber to pass legislation during the regular session, leaving virtually no runway for another substantial rewrite if either vote fails.