Everyone who loves live music has skipped a show because nobody would come along. Concert Buddies, one of the social features inside The Ring by Lux, is built to kill that excuse. The company’s framing is simple: “Concerts are better together.”
How it works
Ring holders can see who else is going to the same show, join small pre-event group chats to make plans, and after the night is over, rate each other with a Buddy Score, a reputation system that rewards people who actually show up and are good company. The chats run on the platform’s end-to-end encrypted messaging, the same system that powers its one-to-one and group chats.
A reputation system for being good at going to concerts.
Solving the room, not the feed
Most music-social features try to make the feed more social. Concert Buddies aims at the room instead: the actual humans standing next to you at a Christian Gates or Dutch Melrose show. That tracks with the company’s larger thesis, that a fan’s real life, the shows attended, the miles traveled, the people met, is the part of fandom worth recording. The ring logs the check-in; Concert Buddies makes sure you were not standing there alone.
Built for a touring year
The timing is no accident. Concert Buddies shipped as part of the v2 rebuild, alongside CHRONO and the Artist’s Vault, right as Christian Gates’ I Believe In Ghosts tour rolls from Los Angeles through Milan, Amsterdam, Berlin, Prague, Paris, Glasgow, Manchester and London. A ring holder landing in any of those cities can open the app and find the other fans who will be in the same room that night, before doors ever open.
It also solves a quieter problem for artists: the fans most devoted enough to travel are often the ones who came alone. Turning a room of strangers into a room of buddies is good for the show, good for the fans, and, once the Buddy Scores start accumulating, good proof of who the community’s best people are.