Competition is on the rise once again in the Canadian ticketing industry, which can only be good news for concertgoers but might spell a further erosion of the Ticketmaster monolith’s traditional stranglehold on the market.

Hot on the heels of Ticketfly’s splashy first incursion north of the border earlier this year — a move that, in Toronto, saw the San Francisco company wrestling away longtime Ticketmaster customers Collective Concerts with much fanfare during Canadian Music Week in March — the past couple of weeks have seen the quiet launch of a new online-ticketing service based in Toronto, TicketSwell, and the Canadian outfit TicketBreak’s acquisition of high-profile local venues Hugh’s Room and the Glenn Gould Studio as new clients.

Ticketmaster isn’t exactly running scared from Ticketfly, Eventbrite and the rest of the latecomers to the business, of course. The company, which merged with concert-promotion giant Live Nation in 2010, moved 120 million tickets for 11,000 clients worth a whopping $8 billion last year, good enough for $1.2 billion in annual revenue of its own.

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Still, as Grant Dexter, CEO of MapleCore — which acquired TicketBreak in 2009 and also runs the MapleMusic Recordings label — points out, when money is changing hands on that scale, even chipping away just one or two or three percent for yourself is pretty good.

“I think there’s a lot of room because the market is so enormous,” he says, noting that in the past 18 months around $100 million has been pumped into the U.S. ticketing industry.

The new breed of ticketing operations pride themselves on offering essentially the same things: the more personal touch that comes from dealing with a smaller company; a willingness to share information about consumers’ buying and social-media habits with their clients; and, of course, cheaper “service fees” than Ticketmaster’s dreaded surcharges of up to 25 percent of a ticket’s face value.

Indeed, Jeff Rogers, the local music-industry veteran behind TicketSwell, says it was seeing a $13 service fee appended to a $35 Ticketmaster ticket for a show by the Darkness at the Phoenix that first got him thinking about starting his own company.

“That seems expensive to me,” he says. “It just seems out of whack with the ticket price, so I’m trying to stay consistent with the ticket price. My idea is to keep the service fees down to a dull roar.”

TicketSwell counts Dundas West indie-rock club the Garrison, the Halifax Urban Folk Festival — where the very first TicketSwell ticket will be redeemed on Aug. 30 (“I guess whoever comes in first, I’ll just buy them dinner,” laughs Rogers) — and October’s MacabreCon horror festival at the Phoenix as its first clients.

Rogers is quick to point out that “I don’t even think I’m in the same business as Ticketmaster.” He’s going after smaller venues and promoters who would like to be in the business of selling event tickets directly to their fans, using a Toronto-made software system called AudienceView that’s too expensive for a modest operation like, say, the Garrison to license for its own purposes.

TicketSwell is content to be a site where one-off events go to sell tickets, but — much like Ticketfly and TicketBreak — it’s also able to provide long-term clients with details about who’s buying those tickets and where and how many people they notified of their purchase via such social media as Facebook and Twitter.

Ticketmaster has typically kept most of that data to itself, but the new services all make a sales pitch similar as TicketBreak’s Dexter: with them, “they’re your customers. You can market and promote and publicize to them and you can collect data on them.”

The tech-savvy Ticketfly, founded by Ticketweb creator Andrew Dreskin in 2008 not long after he sold that business to — yep — Ticketmaster, is the company most obviously angling to become a major Canadian player.

The company’s first international expansion was based on demand from prospective clients such as Collective Concerts and the Union, says Canadian director Bruce Morrison. And it’s gone quite successfully: since Jan. 1, Ticketfly has amassed more than 50 Canadian clients “from the Electric Owl in Vancouver to the Seahorse Tavern in Halifax.”

“When we did our launch in Canada, we came in pretty hard,” observes Morrison, a 13-year veteran of Ticketmaster himself. “That might have stirred up some of these companies that might have already been in existence who have suddenly realized that they maybe need to get on the radar, as well. . . .

“It’s good for everyone to get their game on. Now people have a choice. . . And if that informed choice is more than one or two companies, then all the better for everyone.”

There is an abundance of choice out there all of a sudden. As Shaun Bowring, who oversees operations at the Garrison, puts it: “I’ve been inundated with pitches from ticketing companies over the last year. It’s kind of overwhelming.”

He eventually went with TicketSwell, he says, because it was Canadian, he liked the “robust” system’s analytical potential and he has “a lengthy and positive business relationship with Jeff Rogers, which ultimately leads to a high level of trust.”

Jeff Cohen, who owns the Horseshoe Tavern, Lee’s Palace and part of Collective Concerts, went with Ticketfly for similarly personal reasons.

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“I was with Ticketmaster for 23 years and I never met an owner,” he says. “I had no idea who ran the Toronto office or the Canadian office or anything, and when I first got approached by Ticketfly at a Pollstar convention I sat down and had dinner with the owner. So that was the first thing. I tend to like that contact.”

In the end, ticketing is a growth industry still ruled by one major player, so there’s probably much to gain for anyone with a decent product willing to throw his or her hats in the ring. And Ticketmaster — which begged off commenting for this piece because, a spokeswoman said, “we usually don’t have conversations about competitors” — still has a lot of room to lose before it’ll feel it.

“I was talking to a band manager and they said: ‘Ticketing? Aren’t there a lot of other people doing that already?’” laughs Rogers. “I said: ‘Yes. Managers? Aren’t there a lot of other people doing that already?’ There’s always a lot of people doing something. If you’re lucky enough to be the only person doing a business that everybody wants, pretty soon there’ll be a lot of people in that market.”