California lawmakers pushed AB 1349 across the finish line in the closing minutes of Monday night's legislative session, sending the state's most consequential ticketing reform bill in years to Governor Gavin Newsom — over the objections of the very group that built it.
The bill, authored by Assemblymember Isaac Bryan (D-Los Angeles), targets so-called speculative ticketing: the practice of listing and selling tickets a seller doesn't actually hold or have rights to. It also folds in anti-bot protections, bans on lookalike scalper websites designed to confuse fans, and new liability for sellers who take a fan's money and never deliver — on the hook for double the ticket price plus expenses if they don't come through.
Lawmakers had almost no room to maneuver. Late amendments collided with a rule requiring bills to sit in print for 72 hours before a vote, leaving the Legislature just 15 minutes to pass AB 1349 before session closed.
From co-architect to opponent
The bill's trajectory over the past few months has been a reversal in slow motion. The California chapter of the National Independent Venue Association helped write AB 1349 and its companion bill, AB 1720, and celebrated both in March as a potential national model for ticketing law.
That support cratered after the Senate Business and Professions Committee amended the bill in June in ways NIVA said swept venue operators and primary sellers into rules meant for scalpers, stripping out protections the group considered longstanding practice. NIVA said it reached a fix with Bryan's office this month, but the Senate wouldn't take the new language. By Friday, NIVA and a coalition of some two dozen music and consumer groups — including A2IM, the Recording Academy, RIAA and SAG-AFTRA — were formally urging lawmakers to vote the bill down.
Compounding the split: AB 1720, the companion bill that would have capped resale markups at 10% over face value, died in a Senate committee on August 13 and never got a floor vote — removing much of the coalition's incentive to keep backing AB 1349 alone.
Who else was in the room
NIVA wasn't the only interested party working the bill. StubHub poured as much as $2.6 million into lobbying on California ticketing legislation this cycle — by some counts more than Chevron, Verizon, AT&T or OpenAI spent in the state over the same stretch — and late-added language carved out explicit protections for primary-market ticket holdbacks, along with unusually broad carve-outs letting California pro sports franchises manage their own inventory as they see fit.
That combination — new protections for the primary market, still-live restrictions on speculative resale — is what left NIVA arguing the bill no longer does what it was built to do.
What's next
AB 1349 now sits with Newsom, who can sign or veto it. A signature would make California one of the most aggressive states yet on speculative ticketing, but the mechanics of enforcement — and how "reasonable measures" to prevent bad sales get defined for resale marketplaces — are likely to be fought over in rulemaking long after the ink dries.
