Want Andrew Bird in Your Town? Try Crowdfunding Andrew Bird, a songwriter and multi-instrumentalist on the highbrow end of indie-rock, has played at Carnegie Hall and in clubs from San Francisco to Beijing. But he has barely been to Latin America, despite a growing audience there. For even the most widely traveled musicians big parts of the planet remain underexplored territory; without clear information on audience demand, they are often considered too risky to visit. Some crowdfunding sites are starting to change this geography, however, letting fans raise money to bring their favorite bands to town and mitigating artists" risk in traveling to new places. On Tuesday Mr. Bird's fans in Latin America can start bidding for him to play six shows there in February. Twelve cities are contenders, including big ones like Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo in Brazil, as well as less common tour stops like Santo Domingo, Dominican Republic; and Caracas, Venezuela. The first six cities with 250 provisional ticket sales will get the dates. The campaign is being run by Songkick, a Web site that alerts its users about shows by their favorite acts. Founded in 2007, the site has seven million users a month and partnerships with Spotify, YouTube and MTV. Now it has developed Detour, which adapts the Kickstarter money-raising model to let fans essentially book a tour. "The first problem we started to solve was the frustration with missing out on concerts," Ian Hogarth, its chief executive, said in an e-mail over the weekend. Another side to that frustration is the impatience you have when an artist you love never comes to your city. Detour is our attempt to help fix that. Detour, along with a handful of other sites like Gigfunder, works by letting fans place advance orders for tickets, which are charged only if a certain threshold is reached and therefore the concert takes place. This system reduces the guesswork of booking a tour in an unfamiliar area, where a band might have plenty of Facebook followers but no way of knowing how many of them would buy tickets, said Erik Selz, Mr. Bird's booking agent. Aside from two shows in Mexico City, Mr. Bird has never played any markets in Latin America, Mr. Selz said. Songkick, which is based in London, experimented with crowdfunding a few times over the last year. One campaign, with the electronic dance group Hot Chip, revealed its viral potential. Three English cities off the beaten tour track were offered the chance for a show, but once fans organized in one of them, Folkestone - one sent 2,000 e-mails to friends to get them to pony up - their bids exploded, besting those poor Hot Chip enthusiasts in Stoke-on-Trent and York. For Mr. Bird's tour Songkick is acting as the promoter and ticket seller, taking the bulk of the risk; any profit it makes will come out of ticket sales after it pays expenses, including fees to Mr. Bird and local promoters who will help put on the shows. If the tour is a success, it could serve as a model for others. "The hope," Mr. Selz said, "is that a handful of superfans could take it upon themselves to market the show beyond purchasing the ticket. They'll have a stake in having the tour land in their city.