Update: AB 1349 passed the California Assembly, on to the Senate.
I rely on ticket revenue to pay my band and crew, and I depend on trust—between me and my fans—for my career to work at all. That’s why I support California’s AB 1349. At its core, this bill confronts one of the most corrosive practices in touring: speculative ticketing.
Speculative ticketing isn’t normal resale. It’s when sellers list tickets they don’t actually own and may never acquire. These listings often appear at inflated prices on reseller markets before tickets even go on sale, with no guarantee the seller can deliver the seat. In other words, it’s selling a promise, not a ticket. Fans may think they bought a ticket, but what they’ve really bought is a gamble that the reseller can later obtain the seat—usually at a lower price—and flip it to them while the reseller marketplace looks the other way.
Here’s how it works in practice. A reseller posts a listing, sometimes even a specific section, row, and seat, before they possess anything. The marketplace presents that listing like real inventory: seat maps, countdown timers, “only a few left” banners. That creates artificial scarcity before a single legitimate ticket has even been sold. Once tickets go on sale, the reseller tries to “cover” the sale—buying tickets during the onsale (often using bots or multiple accounts), buying from other resellers who did secure inventory, or substituting some “comparable” seat if the promised one doesn’t exist at an arbitrage price. If they can source lower than what they sold to the fan, they pocket the difference.
When that gamble fails, the risk gets dumped on the fan. Prices jump. Inventory really sells out. The reseller can’t deliver. What follows is a last-minute cancellation, a refund that arrives too late to help, a downgrade to worse seats, or a customer-service maze between the seller and the platform. Fans blame artists even if the artists had nothing to do with the arbitrage. I’ve seen fans get priced out because listings appeared online that had nothing to do with the actual onsale. The reseller and the marketplace profit themselves while the fan, artist and venue suffer.
AB 1349 draws a bright-line rule that should have existed years ago: if you don’t actually have the ticket—or a contractual right to sell it—you can’t list it. That single principle collapses the speculative model. You can’t post phantom seats or inflate prices using imaginary inventory. It doesn’t ban resale. It doesn’t cap prices. It does stop a major source of fraud.
The bill also tackles the deception that makes speculative ticketing profitable. Fake “sold out” claims, copycat websites that look like official artist or venue pages, and listings that bury or hide face value all push fans into rushed, fear-based decisions. AB 1349 requires transparency about whether a ticket is a resale, what the original face price was, and what seat is actually being offered. That information lets fans make rational choices—and it reduces the backlash that inevitably lands on performers and venues when fans feel tricked.
Bots and circumvention tools are another part of the speculative pipeline. Artists and venues spend time and money designing fair onsales, presales for fan clubs, and purchase limits meant to spread tickets across real people. Automated systems that evade those limits defeat the entire purpose, feeding inventory into speculative listings within seconds. AB 1349 doesn’t outlaw resale; it targets the deliberate technological abuse that turns live music into a high-speed extraction game.
I also support the bill’s enforcement structure. This isn’t about turning fans into litigants or flooding courts. It’s about giving public enforcers real tools to police a market that has repeatedly shown it won’t self-regulate.
AB 1349 won’t fix everything overnight. But by stopping people from selling what they don’t have, it moves ticketing back toward a system built on possession, truth, and accountability. If every state prohibited speculative ticketing, it would largely disappear because resale would finally be backed by real inventory. For fans who just want to see the music they love—that’s not radical. It’s essential.
The Trichordist 
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