California Shelves Ticket Resale Price Cap After Months of Lawmaker Skepticism

California lawmakers have shelved a closely watched proposal to impose a 10% cap on ticket resale prices, ending — barring an extraordinary late-session revival — a months-long push backed by Live Nation and its allies in the “Fix The Tix” coalition.

The Senate Appropriations Committee held Assemblymember Matt Haney’s AB 1720 on its suspense file Thursday, while allowing a separate ticketing measure, AB 1349, to move forward.

During the consideration of Haney’s proposed price cap bill, lawmakers repeatedly expressed support for addressing problems in ticketing, but showing increasing skepticism that an artificial cap on lawful resale transactions would actually make tickets more affordable. Concerns were also aired in committee hearings over the financial cost of the proposed regulatory scheme to taxpayers, who were being asked to foot the bill for legislation opponents said would substantially harm competition in the ticketing business while failing to actually reign in prices due to its focus being entirely on resale transactions rather than the ticket market as a whole.

RELATED: California ticketing bills progress but lawmakers show increasing concern over proprosed price cap

By comparison, AB 1349 — which was substantially rewritten in the Senate after initially containing a number of provisions criticized as harmful to ticket portability and independent marketplaces — received a “Do Pass” recommendation and can now move toward the Senate floor.

Haney and supporters of AB 1720 mounted a visible public push in the days immediately preceding the suspense decision.

Haney appeared in Bay Area television coverage August 7, trotting out the reliable talking point that professional resellers routinely scoop up inventory before fans and relist tickets at multiples of their original prices. Days later, independent venue operators joined Haney in another television push ahead of the August 13 suspense hearing, portraying the legislation as a necessary protection for smaller California venues.

The final days also brought a wave of national music-industry coverage centered on StubHub’s spending to oppose the legislation. Reports citing California lobbying disclosures said the resale marketplace dramatically increased its lobbying expenditures as AB 1720 progressed.

That framing mirrored a longstanding argument from the bill’s supporters, who included the National Independent Venue Association, National Independent Talent Organization, Music Artists Coalition and other music-industry advocacy groups. Live Nation publicly endorsed Haney’s proposal immediately after it was announced in February, before substantive resale-cap language had even been placed into the bill.

NIVA later described itself as having helped “architect” AB 1720 and its companion legislation.

But the late push was unable to overcome concerns that had accumulated during the bill’s passage through the Legislature.

AB 1720 would have limited the resale price of covered tickets to 10% above their original purchase price while separately limiting fees charged by resale marketplaces.

The legislation was dramatically narrowed in May after passing through the Assembly Appropriations suspense process. Rather than applying broadly to California live events, its restrictions were limited primarily to qualifying independent venues with capacities of 3,000 or fewer, along with certain nonprofit venues. Professional sports and numerous other athletic events were exempt.

That narrowing may have helped the bill survive the Assembly, but it created a question that followed AB 1720 through virtually every stage of Senate consideration: If a 10% price cap is an effective consumer protection, why should it apply only to a small fraction of the ticket market?

The Senate Business, Professions and Economic Development Committee questioned why 10% was the appropriate number in the first place, noting that the bill did not establish an empirical methodology demonstrating that the threshold represented an appropriate balance between consumer protection and lawful resale.

More fundamentally, committee staff questioned whether regulating the resale price of a lawfully purchased ticket addressed the underlying causes of high ticket prices at all.

Those causes can include primary-market dynamic pricing, inventory allocations and holdbacks, presales, premium programs, venue capacity, artist pricing decisions and extraordinary consumer demand — factors that AB 1720 left untouched.

The committee analysis openly asked whether approaches focused on transparency, disclosure, competition or marketplace practices might address consumer concerns more directly than a resale price restriction.

The Senate Privacy, Digital Technologies and Consumer Protection Committee raised another problem: AB 1720 excluded many of the events where the affordability problem cited by its supporters is most visible.

Its analysis described the bill’s limited application as a “harsh” restriction on its reach, noting that major arena and stadium concerts would generally remain outside the law even though those are frequently the events associated with the largest resale prices.

At the committee hearing, Chair Christopher Cabaldon was even more circumspect.

Cabaldon said he had reviewed economic research on ticketing and expressed uncertainty that price caps actually reduce what consumers pay for tickets overall. In some economic models, he noted, price controls instead change which market participant captures the value generated by extraordinary demand.

That becomes especially complicated in the U.S. ticketing industry because Ticketmaster operates in both the dominant primary-ticketing market and a substantial portion of the resale market.

Cabaldon ultimately declined to recommend either a yes or no vote on AB 1720, describing himself as conflicted over the measure.

The bill survived Privacy 5-2 and later Judiciary 8-4, but the concerns continued.

Ticketmaster Monopoly Cast Shadow Over Debate

Critics repeatedly argued that AB 1720 focused regulation on one of the few portions of ticketing where multiple companies meaningfully compete while leaving the highly concentrated primary market largely untouched.

That argument took on additional significance this year after a federal jury found Live Nation/Ticketmaster liable for anticompetitive conduct, with California among the states pursuing remedies against the entertainment giant.

Consumer Federation of California, Coalition for Ticket Fairness and independent resale platforms argued that imposing strict economics on rival resale marketplaces without regulating primary prices, dynamic pricing, inventory practices or Ticketmaster’s own ticket distribution controls risked further consolidating power in the vertically integrated company.

Another practical issue emerged around compliance.

AB 1720 tied the permitted resale price to what was originally paid for each particular ticket. But independent marketplaces generally do not receive transaction-level pricing information from the primary seller.

In a market where tickets in the same row can be sold at different prices through dynamic pricing, presales, VIP programs and other inventory channels, opponents questioned how an unaffiliated marketplace could reliably determine the legal maximum resale price.

The company with the most complete access to that information would frequently be Ticketmaster itself.

By the time AB 1720 reached Senate Appropriations, the policy questions had been joined by a substantial price tag.

The California Department of Justice estimated that enforcing the bill would cost approximately $1.6 million in fiscal year 2026-27, $1 million the following year, $812,000 in 2028-29 and about $582,000 annually thereafter.

The Department of Finance formally opposed the bill during its August 3 Appropriations hearing, citing those enforcement costs and potential additional pressure on California courts.

AB 1720 was sent to suspense without objection.

On Thursday, it did not come back out.

Narrower AB 1349 Moves Forward

The result was markedly different for AB 1349.

That legislation originally proposed a much broader rewrite of California ticketing law and drew significant criticism over potential marketplace liability and the extent to which it could reinforce control by primary ticket issuers.

Senate committees substantially rewrote the proposal.

The current legislation focuses predominantly on conduct for which there is considerably greater agreement among competing ticket-industry interests: speculative ticket sales, bot and queue circumvention, deceptive ticketing websites and misleading representations about the source and availability of tickets.

It prohibits sellers from engaging in defined speculative sales and bars resale marketplaces from knowingly or recklessly facilitating those transactions while requiring “reasonable measures” to prevent them.

The revised bill passed all three Senate policy committees unanimously.

Its fiscal posture was also dramatically different from AB 1720. DOJ told Appropriations that it did not anticipate a significant fiscal impact from AB 1349, although committee staff identified potential court costs associated with enforcement.

On August 13, Appropriations released AB 1349 from suspense.

That leaves California with a striking split in its approach to ticketing reform: lawmakers have allowed a narrower bill aimed at specific deceptive and fraudulent conduct to continue toward passage while stopping, at least for this session, the effort to impose a government-set ceiling on lawful resale prices.

AB 1349 still needs to clear the remaining floor process before the Legislature’s August 31 deadline.

For AB 1720, however, months of increasingly explicit questions about cost, competition, enforceability and whether resale price controls actually address the causes of high ticket prices finally caught up with the proposal on the Senate suspense file.