Quality Americana

In the time before social media dominated the internet, Chris Huber took his love of music and poetry to Blogger, a hub for artistic and journalistic writing in the pre-Substack web. 

“I was a freshman in college and I just stayed up all night writing one night,” Huber said. “Basically built a blog one night when I was really stoned and it’s become what it is now.”

Extra Chill started as an artistic outlet for Hubber, and has grown into a digital town square for musicians in the Charleston, South Carolina music scene and beyond.

Early Years

“I was writing poems and short stories and things about my life at the time, and then some things about music that I liked,” Huber said. “I was writing about Mac Miller when he was young, but I didn’t start writing about the local music scene until after college.” 

Huber had a job at a retail store and some of his coworkers had a DIY recording of their band that got passed around. 

“He gave me a copy of his band’s album and I just decided to write a review of it,” Huber said. “I was like 21 years old, and it went over really well. I just kind of from there decided ‘ok I’m going to focus on the charleston music scene now.’” 

The direction shaped the brand and gave local artists a voice.

“I needed something to anchor the blog,” Huber said. “It was so random. It was just like ‘oh I wrote a poem, oh my cat has fleas…’ but then it started to become more focused after that.”

Huber discovered local string band Susto one day while streaming music and attended a show.

“When I met him, he was not that big,” Huber said about frontman Justin Osborne. “He was starting to blow up and I heard one of his songs on my Spotify discover weekly, like back in the day. I found out that he was from Charleston and decided to go see the show.”

At the merch table they made a connection.

“I just walked up to him afterwords and I was like ‘yo dude your music’s sick. I’m Chris. I have this website’ and as that band started blowing up I was on the beat. I was writing about it. That’s kind of what helped me really get people to start reading my stuff.” 

Huber said he wrote over a hundred articles about Susto and attended countless shows.

“That was my breaking in,” Huber said. 

As the readership grew, local bands started reaching out to him to feature their work. 

“I was like a hub for them,” Huber said about bands on the Charleston scene.

Live Music Festival

Through the support, they were able to start Extra Chill Fest, a music festival that featured local groups. 

“I went to Shaky Knees festival in Atlanta and I had so much fun, and when I came back I was like ‘I want to host a festival.’ So I started thinking of ideas,” Huber said. 

David Edwards stepped in to take over the production work and the first event was held at the Purple Buffalo in Charleston. 

“We probably had 200 or 300 people show up,” Huber said. “It was all local bands.”

Huber said the event was “kind of a failure in a sense that the cops showed up and shut us down.” It was a remote location and they thought the noise ordinance would be flexible but were wrong. The police moved the event inside, preventing the headlining act from performing on the main stage they set up. 

“It kind of threw the vibe off,” Huber said, “but I did it again the next year at a different venue. I did two nights there and that was way more successful.” 

The second event was held at the Royal American and showed real potential but then the pandemic hit.

“It kind of threw everything off and I stopped doing the festival for two years,” Huber said. He was able to hold five Extra Chill festivals before his move to Austin.

A Change in SEO

The magazine traffic grew after Huber wrote hundreds of articles about music history and was able to build a list of subscribers. Larger companies were even sending him offers to buy his brand.

“I would take a song and analyze it and be like ‘what’s this song about,’” Huber said. It was a step on the pathway to fulfill his vision of having a full-time writing gig. The traffic allowed Huber to place ads on his website and fund the operation. 

“It doesn’t work anymore,” Huber said. “Everything crashed down. Google changed their algorithm.”

Huber said the AI overview on the search engine is now drastically reducing the amount of readership independent publishers see. 

“You only see like corporate stores now. You don’t see as many DIY indie publications on there,” Huber said. “I went from 10k clicks a day on Google to three hundred in the course of two years. I had a crazy rise to success in that regard and then slowly watched it teeter back down to almost nothing.”

Captain of the Ship

Huber is sailboat captain on the side, a skill he learned in his youth.

“I started sailing since I was a little kid,” Huber said. “I worked professionally as a sailboat captain for 6 years and then I quit and I was doing Extra Chill full time.”

The Lone Star State

Huber moved to Austin, Texas and has been using his tech skills to support the arts. He’s created a forum at Extra Chill for artists to network and find each other’s work. He also features a music calendar that works with local and major ticketing companies, as well as allowing independent artists to post their show dates.

“I think I’m in a pivotal time right now,” Huber said. “Instead of just going for volume, I’m going for more dedication and building kind of like a movement.” 

Right now Huber is working to build useful wordpress tools and grow his business knowledge to support Extra Chill. There is an option to grow a social media following that could support the operation, but would require something viral.

“You need a lot of views,” Huber said, “but it is an avenue to make money.”  

Extra Chill, “a melting pot for independent music” will continue to support the live music scene and artists that give us the music we love. Click here to check out their front page and subscribe to their newsletter and social media.