Best Coast & Her Internetz: An Analysis of Bethany Constantino's Band/Project's Internet Marketing Presence

bestycoasty.blogspot.com

Best Coast is big on California.

Her logo is a map of LA.

She has tattoos of California.

And she shot a music video in front of In-N-Out:

She's pretty laid back & chill, kinda like LA...

If I didn't know any better, I'd think that she's my stoner friend next door.

Keeping with the casual California vibes, her website is a blog: hip and personal, like talking to a friend:

But not just any friend. She wants you to do something, too. A call to action, so to speak.

The vital Call-to-Action keeps viewers interested and engaged, and it keeps them coming back. 

She wants you to follow her on myspace, twitter and facebook.  

She wants you to buy her merch.  

And she wants you to sign up for her mailing list.

All of which are conveniently located at the top right of every page on her blog:

If we lose 10-15% of our audience with each additional they have to make, perhaps she would sell more albums if she had a direct link to buy right on her blog.  

Then again, she has some pretty cool, specialized merch, the most interesting ones being:

Cat Cozy for your beer/soda when you're chillin on the beach

Sunglasses, 'cos it's always sunny in Los Angeles

Tote bag, 'cos you need somewhere to keep the cozy and the sunglasses when you're not using them

So maybe getting people to click on the merch link gets them to buy more product that they otherwise wouldn't have noticed.

But she doesn't just sell specialized merch....
She also sells vinyls and CDs of her album "Crazy For You." 

If you're not into the physical thing, you can go to amazon.com or Itunes and buy downloads of the album/tracks off the album.  

Amazon even has a FREE download of her song "Each And Every Day."  I would have had no idea if I didn't take the trouble to go to Amazon of my own accord.


Itunes has her under "Alternative," where similar artists include Vivian Girls (another fuzzy, girl band) and Beach House (a mellow indie group, which also came up on Amazon's related artist list).


Yet she doesn't have any links on her blog that lead us there.

Is she losing business that way or is she getting more people to buy the physical product?

What if you want to buy a concert ticket? You can't even find her tour dates on her blog...(unless they're buried somewhere in an old post, but who looks back that far?)

Well, she is on sites like stubhub.com and ticketmaster, but it makes fans work a bit hard to find out where the best place to buy her tickets is.

While her tour dates aren't on her blog, she is on other calendering services including Eventful.com and Songkick.com, and her dates are listed on her Myspace (myspace.com/bestcoast)

The layout of her myspace is simple: just a couple videos, contact information for her managers/booking agents, a list of past/current releases and a calendar of her tour dates.

Interestingly, her myspace hides her friends as well as comments.  

While perhaps in some way this might encourage people to comment on her blog instead, she only receives a handful of comments for each post....not anywhere near as many views as she gets.

On average her blog gets about 1500-2000 unique viewers a month (all measurements from compete.com), but in April 2010 she peaked to 4300 viewers....most likely because this is when she released her video "When I'm With You"

Looking at this video, we can see that irony and kitsch play a big role in Best Coast's image.  Combined with her lightheartedness and summery, fuzzy indie-pop sound, she definitely speaks to a younger 18-35 demographic who are probably mostly middle class and white (though I'm basing the "middle class" and "white" on mostly experience rather than research, so it may be a bit of a generalization...)

Other peaks & things that happened that month which might have caused them:
July: 3300 viewers
Feature in NME
Released a collaborative song with a Vampire Weekend member and Kid Cudi

September: 3200 viewers
Nominated for Venus magazine's "Best Breakthrough Band of 2010"
Video feature on Amoeba Records' website.

November: 5400 viewers 
Was on tour in the States, and she had announced another tour with fellow fuzzy hipster project Wavves.

How are people finding her site? What are the pages that link to her blog--the Inbound Links.


When I typed link:bestycoasty.blogspot.com into google's search field, I got quite different results than when I did the same on yahoo.


Google gave me some websites such as 

• Time Out NY
• monstera.com--a booking agency site
• gimmetinnitus.com (an mp3 blog)

Most seemed pretty random, though, and some were in foreign languages.

Yahoo, on the other hand, gave me an overwhelming number of blogs and magazines:

• Pitchfork (news about her debut album)
• owlandbear.com (a music blog that mentioned her tour with Wavves and included an mp3)
• magnetmagazine.com (this was highest on the list, which mentioned a rerun of her performance on Jimmy Fallon's show)
• http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Best_Coast

So overall, it seems like other blogs and magazines talking about Best Coast and linking back to her site bring in much of her traffic.



As for social media sites besides Myspace, she is on Facebook and Twitter, but she doesn't seem to have an official Youtube channel

• 20,633 Facebook likes.  She updates frequently with news/photos/tour dates or trivial details about what she's doing
• 25,169 Twitter followers, her tweets are different from what is on her blog and her facebook

None of her sites demonstrate an ability to share/forward content, such as songs/photos (unless you do something like retweeting her tweets)

Interestingly, her email list isn't a standard mailing list, but rather a notice email that informs subscribers when her website has been updated.  
Perhaps that also brings in a lot more viewers per month?


Summary
Overall, Best Coast appears to have a strong internet presence.  She has an all encompassing style, which permeates her website, social networking sites, her music videos, songs, merch, album art work, you name it.  In essence, she has created a brand out of herself, similar to someone like Lady Gaga, though targeted to a different audience.  Perhaps she can do a better job of having her music readily available, such as directly linking to Itunes from her page.  In having a personal, down-to-earth approach she has carved out a decently sized niche audience.