California Assemblymember Matt Haney is taking a swing at sky-high ticket markups. He rolled out the California Fans First Act, a bill that would cap resale prices for concert and other live-event tickets at 10% above the original price. Haney announced the proposal outside the Castro Theatre in San Francisco, flanked by independent venue operators and local SAG-AFTRA members. The bill is set for a hearing in the Assembly Appropriations Committee.
What the Fans First Act would do
AB 1720 would bar secondary-market sales for concerts, theater, comedy, and similar live events in California at prices exceeding 10% above face value, fees included, according to Assemblymember Matt Haney’s office. The bill’s legislative record shows it has been amended in committee and re-referred to the Assembly Appropriations Committee as it moves through the process, per LegiScan.
Why the timing matters
The measure is gaining steam in the wake of an April verdict in which a federal jury found Live Nation and Ticketmaster illegally monopolized parts of the ticketing market, a ruling that has sharpened scrutiny of resale and primary-market practices, according to NBC News. That decision, combined with sharp spikes in festival and tour resale prices, has helped push AB 1720 through two Assembly committees and onto the appropriations docket, also reported by NBC News.
Backers and critics
Live Nation has publicly applauded Haney’s approach and framed the cap as a way to clamp down on what it calls predatory resale sites, according to Live Nation. Opponents, including resale platforms and some competition-policy experts, counter that a hard price cap could gut the secondary market and shift even more pricing power back to dominant primary sellers, a concern detailed by TicketNews.
Enforcement and penalties
Haney has said enforcement would fall to the California attorney general and would be aimed at industrial-scale brokers rather than individual fans, according to his office. The San Francisco Chronicle reports that the bill would not create a private right of action and that penalties could reach several thousand dollars per offending ticket.
What’s next
AB 1720 is scheduled for consideration in the Assembly Appropriations Committee on Thursday, where lawmakers are expected to hash out technical fixes, enforcement details, and whether a 10% cap is legally and practically workable, according to ABC7. If it clears the committee, the bill would head to the Assembly floor and then to the Senate, setting up a broader test of whether state-level price caps can rein in runaway ticket markups without triggering a whole new set of problems.
