You'd need a lot of capital. The second tier players (e.g. ticketweb.com, tickets.com, etix.com) have either been bought by Ticketmaster or can't compete directly. Tickets.com tried to do playoff ticketing for the Rockies and it was an utter failure. Live Nation has had tons of problems doing primary ticketing for big events. Ticket sales have been getting hammered in this economy so I'm sure this deal made a lot of sense based on the candy land projections made by the myriad VPs of Corporate Whatever found at both companies. But I can't think of a time where projected cost savings have actually fully materialized. For the consumer, this sucks.

There's actually been some small/middle market competitor decks floating around in VC circles, but there's no way they get funded in this economy. From the TicketStumbler perspective, we don't include any of their tickets on our main listings (too many clicks & hoops to buy) just on our ticket blog where we publish presale passwords for free.