[noodle]

I briefly worked on starting a small competitor to TM as a contractor (which is incidentally still around and doing fine). The reason TM is hard to disrupt boils down to this:

Everyone makes more revenue when they go with TM - artists, venues, etc - everyone except for the ticket buyers, who pay out the nose. And TM plays the "bad guy" role in the equation to cover for all of those other people. Yes, TM holds a lot of contracts with venues, even owns some venues outright. But those contracts wouldn't exist if they weren't very juicy for the venue.