BUFFALO, N.Y. -- Every Monday, we introduce you to a Buffalo City Shaper - a business owner or volunteer who is impacting our community in a positive way.
This week, 2 On Your Side's Kelly Dudzik tells us how a Western New York native is changing the concert industry.
Kenmore native Chris Ring founded Fanbassador two years ago. He is hoping to turn the concert promotion industry on its head.
"Fanbassador is a fan engagement platform that basically utilizes social media, email blasts, text marketing connecting fans with their artists," explains Ring.
With almost twenty years of experience bringing artists to Buffalo, Chris is now working with more than thirty artists and managers on the Fanbassador platform.
Fanbassador takes data crowd-sourced from fans and combines it with analytical data from music streaming services that break down playlists by zip code so the company can show the artists where they're popular. All that information helps the artists make better touring decisions.
"So, that's a lot different from back in the day when a band would get into a bus and just drive and go city to city," said Dudzik.
"Just hit the road, exactly, we want to make touring smarter. We have so much technology available to us today, why not utilize it. The booking world hasn't really changed its model in seventy plus years," says Ring.
A spin-off of Fanbassador is the Tailor Made Music Festival. Last September, Fanbassador secured two headliners and let fans vote on the rest of the artists. They could choose from a pool of about twenty national artists and fifteen local acts. Almost nine-thousand fans came to that festival at Canalside.
"The fans really got behind the concept. The artists were excited because the ones that got chosen knew that they were literally chosen by the fans. So, when they got up on stage, it was really like, thank you Buffalo, you guys made this happen, and the ones that didn't, they weren't bummed out because if you would have come here, it might not have been a great show for you, so there's only so many weekends a year these artists have to book, why not have them book a better show in a different city," says Ring.
Ring is planning a Tailor Made Festival in Orlando, and he's already looking at licensing the concept to some of the country's largest music festivals.
"If we can try it with a bunch of artists in a bunch of different areas, and prove the concept, we think it's something that can catch on nationwide and hopefully a way that artists look to tour in the future," says Ring.
Ring is currently looking for the perfect venue for this year's Tailor Made Buffalo concert.
If you know a Buffalo City Shaper, you can nominate someone by sending Kelly an email.