WBEZ 91.5 Chicago

Redbox is hoping to turn its kiosks at grocery stores and fast food joints into mini ticket counters nationwide.

Don’t expect to see Redbox seriously encroaching on Live Nation/Ticketmaster’s business, here or anywhere else.  The company’s plan really is really a penny-wise, pound-foolish scheme that most smart promoters loathe: papering the house.

War is good for nothing but Chicago seemed to be in the midst of perhaps a new chapter in the local club wars.

Tickets for Sunday’s Chicago Bears, Green Bay Packers Playoff game sold out in less than a minute today, but Bears communications director Scott Hagel said there’s still hope for fans who want to see the game. “There is a gameface contest,” he said.

The deadline for promoters responding to the request for proposals to privatize Taste of Chicago, the Blues Festival, and the five other soon-to-be-formerly-free city music festivals was 4 p.m.

Mayor Daley has been talking for some time about privatizing the Taste of Chicago and other major city music festivals in Grant and Millennium parks.

In the months before the two most reviled companies in the concert world decided to join forces in a mega-merger that makes them the Death Star of Live Music, giant national concert promoters Live Nation toyed with thumbing their noses at Ticketmaster’s much-hated, consumer-gouging “conv