Ticketmaster won't like it

It's currently (it looks like) only live in the Americas but LiveStub is offering a new approach to the secondary ticketing problem.

It reckons that it's going to build a transparent ticket marketplace, offering people the opportunity to see the best-value tickets on offer for whichever event. So you can still get scalped, but only to the level of a grey-market scalping. Hypebot is quite impressed:

The internet has created an expectation of free - from music and movies via P2P to Google's latest application or service. Free, however, did not extend to the re-sale of concert tickets; the so called secondary ticket market. Sites like StubHub tacked on as much as 20% for the privilege of reselling your extra seats.

Concert_ticket LiveStub.com's goal is to change ticket resales with a free online service that also makes the transaction more transparent; and Morten Lund, the Dane whose early investment helped propel Skype, is putting his financial muscle behind it.

The problem is that primary ticket sellers aren't really bothered about secondary markets being bear pits, anarchy-dens or fraud-beacons. They just don't like the idea of people extracting value from something they've sold for less money. So don't expect to see Ticketmaster embracing this service any time soon... unless they decided to buy the company and add the technology to their site. In which case: don't expect it to remain free for long.