California’s ticketing industry could be undergoing some major changes.
On Thursday, state Assemblymember Matt Haney (D-San Francisco) introduced a new bill, the California Fans First Act, that would impose price caps on tickets sold in the resale market, limiting prices to no more than 10% above the ticket’s face value.
By making it illegal to sell overly expensive tickets, AB 1720 is aimed at making resale tickets more affordable for fans. If the legislation becomes law, it would apply only to shows in California and exclude tickets to sporting events.
AB 1720 was introduced weeks after a similar bill, AB 1349, reached the California Senate. The latter aims to ban speculative ticket sales (tickets that resellers don’t yet possess) in the state. If enacted, the proposed legislation would require sellers to have event tickets in their possession before listing them for sale and would raise the maximum civil penalty for each violation from $2,500 to $10,000.
Both bills aim to better regulate the state’s resale ticketing market.
Over the last several years, high ticket prices have been a recurring complaint among concertgoers. Rising demand for tickets has spurred a secondary resale marketplace for all kinds of high-profile live events, including music tours and sports games, making it harder to get tickets on the primary market.
Ticketmaster and its parent company Live Nation have been at the center of this issue for years, as the major ticketing vendor sells around 80% of tickets through its website. The company is currently facing lawsuits from both the Department of Justice and the Federal Trade Commission, alleging monopolistic practices and illegal ticket vendor practices.
“We’re trying to convince the federal government and state governments to get on the same page of recognizing where the problem is, which is overwhelmingly in the resale industry, and trying to do something about it,” said Dan Wall, Live Nation’s vice president of corporate and regulatory affairs, in a previous interview with The Times.
In a statement, Live Nation said it supports “efforts to protect concert fans and artists” and that the latest bill “targets a core problem in live music: predatory resale sites.”
Similar legislation has been popping up nationwide and around the world — the U.K. recently announced plans to ban the resale of tickets for prices higher than their face value.
A resale cap was successfully passed in Maine last year, with tickets only allowed to be sold at 110% of the ticket’s original price. Other states like New York, Vermont, Washington and Tennessee are also considering ticketing regulations.
Some critics see this surge of ticketing legislation as a way to distract from Ticketmaster/Live Nation’s legal troubles and single out the resale market.
Diana Moss, the director of competition policy at the Progressive Policy Institute, said that by capping resale ticket prices, AB 1720 “puts consumers last, not first.”
“It buys into the false narrative that the secondary market is to blame for all problems in ticketing, deflecting attention from the Live Nation-Ticketmaster monopoly,” said Moss in a statement to The Times. “Caps will decimate resale, the only market with competition, and hand Live Nation even more power to jack up ticket fees.”