2026 Impact NextGen Honoree: Chris Visconti

CHRIS VISCONTI
Music Agent AGE: 36
UTA

Comic Rec?
The new “Absolute Batman” series

In 2005, a then-teenaged Chris Visconti saw the “Taste of Chaos Tour” in Asbury Park, New Jersey. On the bill: My Chemical Romance, The Used, Underoath, Killswitch Engage. All on the way up, all ultimately to become major acts in the rock, punk and metal spaces Visconti would eventually find himself working within.

Shortly thereafter, Visconti took the reins himself, booking punk and hardcore shows in his small Pennsylvania hometown.

“That snowballed to me starting at The Agency Group, my first ‘real job,’” he says. These days, he represents a wide-ranging roster of talent within those genres at UTA including A Day to Remember, The All-American Rejects, Bush, Jimmy Eat World, Magnolia Park and From Ashes To New, among many others.

And his acts have had an eventful year.

Highlights include A Day To Remember’s first curated cruise selling out during pre-sale, along with “launching the Jimmy Eat World Bleed American anniversary tour at a sold-out Red Rocks, and continuing to build Magnolia Park brick-by-brick, selling out clubs and seeing main stage festival slots.” 

The Jimmy Eat World Red Rocks show grossed $556,948 on 8,942 tickets June 9, according to Pollstar Boxoffice reports.

Rightly for a guy who made his bones in the DIY, all-ages, backyard, garage show space as a teenager, Visconti insists that while the highly connective world we’ve built through the internet and the concomitant terabytes of data available in nanoseconds are important, the power of good old-fashioned intuition shouldn’t be discounted.

“My generation is lucky in that so much amazing music and talent is at our fingertips because of social media. At the same time, we can develop an overreliance on metrics as opposed to our gut feeling about a song or an artist,” he says.

Indeed, he says the world’s biggest streaming service and its user-driven playlist is a tool to find the artist who can stoke that gut feeling.

“Fan-made Spotify playlists are a great place to find artists who maybe haven’t hit your radar yet,” he says, a good encapsulation of finding the middle space between the algorithm and the passion of the underground punk show.

Visconti says the hardest part of his job is finding enough time in the day — a not uncommon complaint — but that work’s paying off now and down the road, because he’s already geared up for “touring and festival plans around the world over the next two years. Looking forward to sharing more when I can.”