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LiveStub, a Toronto and Chicago based company, went all out on breaking the market monopoly for online ticket sales. LiveStub is now offering tickets exchange free, and with that said means no commissions charged on sellers. Thus, doing away with the usual 15 percent (commission) charges levied on the sellers by all the trading companies.

As LiveStub decided to pull out its big guns, its competitors StubHub, TicketsNow, and RazorGator might be in a bit of a shell shock. Thanks to Internet though, as selling tickets on a secondary ticket market has been made legal, the method previously known as scalping. The company was lifted up recently by an undisclosed amount of angel funding from Morten Lund (early investor in Skype).

LiveStub’s unique advantage over its competitors (apart from its price) is that it doesn’t require any registration for users. Thus, allowing transactions to be quicker. Also, its interface is easier to understand and use. The format is quite simple, a search bar and a list of tickets. You can filter, based on popularity, date of addition, and event schedule.

Searching for tickets is interesting as LiveStub shows a graph that describes the event’s average ticket price and its popularity over time. Whereas another feature shows you how much your ticket is worth.

Whereas sources say that LiveStub isn’t all that it seems, as the ticket data is pre-populated directly from TicketsNow. The entire sales transactions are linked through TicketsNow’s system, which could mean that LiveStub is not that different a service. With that said and done, Michael Hershfield, the CEO of LiveStub claims that this process was necessary to give the site an early start, and it wasn’t a ploy to mislead the users.

I’d say it’s going to be a popular stint for LiveStub. With the commission free service it could well bring down ticket prices, and make it consistent throughout. As for the tough competition LiveStub is facing, it could well be a short stint.