While sites such as StubHub often have tickets when the box office doesn't, service fees – a longtime inspiration for Ticketmaster-bashing – can still be high. But Live Nation – the heavyweight national concert promoter that runs downtown's House of Blues (among other venues) and accounts for about 17 percent of Ticketmaster's revenues – has not renewed its contract and may launch its own ticketing operation. Not only do more than 40 percent of event tickets generally go unsold, says Mike McGee, a Ticketmaster executive vice president, but promoters and venues (with some input from Ticketmaster) have to set prices that make economic sense without provoking a public revolt. McGee acknowledges that “the rise of Internet ticketing and the online reselling of tickets have utterly transformed this business and made it easier for new ticketing companies to crop up – many successfully. read more