Since SXSW, I’ve been quietly building the future of Extra Chill, and now it’s time to show you what’s next.
To quote my good friend Chris Gardner: “Now we’re cooking with gas.”
Here’s what I’ve been working on:
Festival Wire
Festival Wire is a real-time, fully automated music festival news feed. It provides a stream of fact-checked music festival content, sourced from Reddit and various news websites, all day every day. I’ve also added fully automated Facebook, Twitter, and BlueSky feeds to share a link every hour.
Dark Mode
Extra Chill now detects your system dark mode preference and provides a different version of the site automatically. I’ve also redesigned the whole thing to use a modern card layout instead of our old classic blog look.
List Your Own Events
Community Members can now list their own events on our calendar. The calendar is one of the most popular features of Extra Chill, but it is automated based on ticketing websites and venue sites, so sometimes it misses the DIY stuff. Now you can get free eyeballs on your events via our calendar.
Sarai Chinwag in the Forum
There is some lore behind this one. Sarai Chinwag was my first experiment with AI, starting as a fictional Extra Chill writer. Now, Sarai Chinwag is a context-aware forum bot that can read Extra Chill articles and provide music scene knowledge. Simply @saraichinwag in our forum and she will join the conversation.
Coming Soon: Band Platform
I’m aware that the current “Independent Artist Space” forum is a little confusing, and less than ideal. I have a way better idea that will make Extra Chill much more valuable for artists. We will be giving artists their own forum built into a customizable profile, so they can create full communities around their music on our platform.
This will replace the current Independent Artist forum with something that feels more like a directory. It will be much easier to manage and understand.
Coming Soon: Linktr.ee Alternative
Last night I purchased the domain “extrch.co”. I will be creating a Linktr.ee alternative that will be completely free for Extra Chill Community members and catered to being used by independent artists. This will be tied into the band platform in some way that I will figure out.
These companies charge money for that service and I would rather give it away for free and get everyone to link to our platform to share their own music. So, I’m going to do it.
The Final Destination: Extra Chill App
Once I finish adding all these crazy new features, I want to create a mobile app version of Extra Chill that will make it simple to interact with everything on our site without a web browser. It’s going to take me a while to get there, but the road is heading in that direction.
Shelved: Artist Merch Store
A while back I mentioned an idea to add a DIY artist merch store to the site. This is being shelved for now. It would have been a lot to manage and I’m already juggling a million things. Maybe in the future if there are resources for employees to help with this stuff I can revisit this one.
Final Thoughts
Overall, I’m thinking big picture with Extra Chill. It started as a blog, but it’s becoming a full-fledged music platform little by little. We will provide undeniable value for free to support independent music. By doing this, we hope to create a platform that is indispensable to artists and their fans, and truly deserves the title: Online Music Scene.