In my time there, I would agree with that. My theory was Ticketmaster did well for theory reasons: 1) Venue relationships 2) Taking the fall on fees 3) Abilit

In my time there, I would agree with that. My theory was Ticketmaster did well for theory reasons: 1) Venue relationships 2) Taking the fall on fees 3) Ability to scale People are often surprised by #3. Having seen many startups try & fail (as well as large entities like LiveNation), ticketing is a hard problem. In my time at Yahoo & Google, I believe they have the technology to build a ticketing company, but beyond on that, most -- startups to large entities such as LiveNation & CTS -- had big problems handling onsales for large U2-sized events. In fact, it always made me think "Good luck with that" when people would talk about the design of ticketing systems using relational DBs. :)