Featuring heavyweight artists like Fetty Wap, The Wknd, Demi Levato and Selena Gomez, Forbes’s 30 Under 30 Music Class Of 2016 also happens to list a 2007 MTSU Recording Industry graduate: Cassandra Petrey, a 29-year old entrepreneur from Kentucky.
Petrey is the co-founder of Crowd Surf, a digital marketing agency that uses social media to forge deeper artist-audience relationships through release-week campaigns, exclusive content and direct access. She got her start during the Backstreet Boys’ original pop reign in the ’90s. Petrey showed her super-fandom by starting a 10,000-subscriber fanzine and following the act to far-off locales like Norway, but as she prepared to launch her own music business career, she noticed a gap between her passion and what the industry would support.
“There just wasn’t a higher-level job that revolved around connecting artists with their fans,” Petrey said.
In 2007, at the age of 21 and still a college student at MTSU, she co-founded Crowd Surf. Today, her company boasts a 35-person team with four offices and a roster of accounts with a combined 800 million followers. The company manages social profiles for Britney Spears, the Black Eyed Peas, Steven Tyler and other notable artists.
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