Field Note

Harlow's is fighting for a ticket resale cap. The other side says it helps Ticketmaster.

AB 1720 would cap resale at 10% over face value for rooms under 3,000 seats. Harlow's owner Jim Cornett drove to the Capitol to testify for it. Here's the case on both sides, and where it stands.

Eddie Stratton · July 2, 2026

Photo: California State Senate

A man in a Harlow's t-shirt stood at a microphone in a Senate hearing room on June 30 and made the case for a bill most Sacramentans have never heard of.

That was Jim Cornett, who owns Harlow's on J Street. He was not there to talk about a show. He was there to talk about the resale market, the one where an eighty-dollar ticket to a sold-out night can reappear on StubHub for three hundred before the openers are even announced.

"Ninety-five percent of the tickets there are all from ticket brokers," Cornett told the Senate Judiciary Committee. "That's who uses StubHub." His point, when he got to it, was blunt: "We're trying to protect our customers, protect our venues and protect our artists. This is what this bill is about."

The bill is AB 1720, the California Fans First Act, and Harlow's has put its name on it in public, on Facebook and Instagram, thanking Sacramento's own Senate Majority Leader Angelique Ashby by name. For a room that lives and dies on sold-out nights, that is a political stand. It is also a more complicated one than the headline suggests.

What the bill actually does

AB 1720, authored by Assemblymember Matt Haney of San Francisco, caps the resale price of a ticket at no more than ten percent above its face value, fees included. Sell your ticket to a show you can't make, and you can still sell it. You just can't flip an eighty-dollar ticket for three hundred. The cap resets on every resale, so brokers can't launder the markup through a chain of sales, and the original price has to be printed on the ticket and the listing.

Here is the part that matters most for Sacramento, and the part the first wave of coverage skipped: the cap only applies to independent venues with 3,000 seats or fewer. Harlow's, at roughly 500, is covered. Ace of Spades, around 1,000, is covered. Golden 1 Center, at about 17,000, is completely exempt. So is every arena and stadium tour that rolls through town. The bill polices the rooms where Sacramento's working musicians actually play, and leaves the biggest rooms, where the biggest scalping happens, untouched.

Concerts, comedy and theater are in. Professional sports are out. Enforcement runs from $1,000 to $5,000 a ticket, handled by the attorney general or a city or county attorney. Bots and speculative "ghost" listings are handled by a companion bill, AB 1349.

The case for it

The people backing AB 1720 are not shy about the target. The National Independent Venue Association, the group that kept small rooms alive through the shutdown, is the spine of the support, along with the Music Artists Coalition and SAG-AFTRA. Their argument is an economic one: at a ten percent ceiling, the mass-scalping business model stops working. There is no money in buying a hundred tickets if you can only mark each one up by eight dollars. Kill the margin, and you keep the seats in the hands of people who actually want to be in the room, along with the money they spend at the bar and the merch table, and the connection between an artist and a crowd that showed up on purpose.

Cornett's version was the local one. Ashby's was sharper still. When she spoke, she cut straight at the Sacramento of it: "Harlow's doesn't care what Ticketmaster is doing. Harlow's is trying to do what they've been doing for decades in Sacramento, which is show up for Sacramento." She did not oversell it. "Is 1720 a full package solution to everything going on with ticket resale? Nope. But is it going to help some of the small venues do better? Yes it is, and therefore it's an aye vote for me."

The case against it

Now the other side, because there is a real one, and it is not the scalpers you would expect.

StubHub, SeatGeek and Vivid Seats have spent roughly $1.1 million lobbying against the bill. Their argument, made by StubHub's Jack Sterne and echoed in committee, is that a resale cap on everyone except Ticketmaster hands the Ticketmaster monopoly more power. Kill the independent resale market, the logic goes, and you clear the field for Live Nation's own resale platform, which the bill does not touch the same way.

And here is the detail that gives even supporters pause: Live Nation backs this bill. The same Live Nation that a federal jury found, in April 2026, had illegally monopolized ticketing. When a convicted monopolist likes a consumer-protection law, consumer advocates look twice, and several have. The Consumer Federation of California called it "a wolf in sheep's clothing." LULAC and the Progressive Policy Institute have raised flags. Economists warn that price caps tend to push resale into unregulated gray markets, Facebook Marketplace and cash in a parking lot, where there is no refund and no fraud protection when the "ticket" turns out to be a screenshot.

Senator Roger Niello voted no, and his reason was narrower and quieter: with active federal litigation over Ticketmaster underway, he said, he did not think it was the Legislature's place to put a thumb on that scale.

Ashby took the monopoly charge on directly, which is more than most of the bill's supporters have done. "This bill is sponsored and supported by the folks who have stood up and fought against the monopoly more than anyone else," she said. "They're the independent venues that are not owned by Live Nation." Her read: the people asking for this are Ticketmaster's competitors, not its allies, and "there's nothing about this that would in any way strengthen the folks with Live Nation Ticketmaster."

Where the fans land

They land split, and you can watch it happen in real time under Harlow's own post. "Thank you for fighting the good fight," one wrote. "Brilliant," said another. Then: "Wish they would do that to Ticketmaster." And, sharper: "Stupid. The peer-to-peer resale sites like StubHub and Vivid aren't the problem." Somebody just asked the question the bill's fine print answers and its supporters rarely mention out loud: "What about the fees?"

That is the honest state of it. The people who want cheaper tickets and the people who smell a Ticketmaster giveaway are, a lot of the time, the same people, arguing with themselves in the comments.

Where it stands

AB 1720 passed the Assembly floor 49-16 in May. It cleared Senate Judiciary on June 30 by a vote of 8 to 4, Ashby among the ayes, and moved to Senate Appropriations, where the sticking point is the cost of enforcement. From there it needs the Senate floor and Governor Newsom's signature. Newsom has not said where he stands, and the antitrust question is exactly the kind that has drawn his veto pen before.

So the fight is not over, and it is not simple. What is settled is this: a Sacramento venue owner put on a t-shirt with his own club's name on it, drove to the Capitol, and told a committee that the people who play his room and the people who fill it are getting worked over. Whatever AB 1720 turns out to be, Harlow's said so out loud, with its name attached.

_Sac Setlist surfaced this bill on the Setlist Wire, our own music-scene newswire. Facts are sourced from the June 30 Senate Judiciary hearing record and the bill text; we flag what we don't yet know._

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