February 08, 2005
Since We're On the Subject ... Unofficial Beastie Boys Fan Site Beastiemania is Da' Bizzomb!
In the previous post, we mentioned that the Beastie Boys have a great web site. Well now it's time for us to give a shout out to an unofficial fan site we've grown fond of called Beastiemania.com. But first some perspective and context.
Back in June 2004, when the Beastie Boys released the single "Ch-check It Out," the first single from the album "To the 5 Boroughs," the hip-hop trio also re-launched their newly redesigned website, which had been languishing as a mere splash page devoid of content beyond a simple logo in the intervening years since their last big album and the demise of Mike D.'s Grand Royal record label. However, in the process of re-launching the site to promote and support the new disc and upcoming tour, the Beasties created one of the best band web sites we've ever seen.
As the medium goes, www.beasties.com is exemplary in terms of content, design, functionality, multimedia and--especially--interactivity. The site demonstrates how a well-planned web strategy can really add another dimension to the way fans experience the artist's music and how band and fan interact, as well as how the audience turns into a community. The application of the band-site idea is not new--it's as old as the Internet--but the Beastie Boys have raised the bar by employing the Internet so intelligently and by making their site such a high-quality online destination.
The flipside of the offical band-site coin is the unofficial fan web site, the amateur sites cobbled together by hardcore fans with the time and passion to set up the site and maintain it. The results of said efforts can be surpisngly good, but more often than not these sites just look plain crappy, offer little meaningful content or interactivity, and amount to so many stale online shrines in tribute to the artist, be it Justin Timberlake or Judakiss.
But, some of these sites aren't crappy, and, in fact, some of them are amazing resources for the serious and and casual fan alike. The Beastie Boys may have indirectly set the standard here, or rather, the Beasties have inspired an excellent unoffical site.
Beastiemania.com has a wealth of fresh, compelling content. Some of it is the general info on the New York rap group that one would expect, like the Beastie Boys biography and discography. And some of the content is the obscure minutiae that sets the site apart, such as a stunnningly thorough who's who of people who have been involved in big and small ways with the Beastie Boys throughout the band's twenty-plus-year career.
The person(s) behind Beastiemania.com have actually created some well-made stylish graphical elements ( see their logo above) as part of the overall web design. The site design itself is competent and solid, even if style is not quite our cup of tea as far as web site look-and-feel goes. The key, as a fan site, is that Beastiemania is not harsh on the eye. It's not crappy.
In a good way, the old cliche that "content is king" holds ture with Beastiemania. The site goes a few giant steps farther than most such unofficial online fan sites. The producers have conducted their own interviews with all sorts of people related to the Beastie Boys in even the remotest ways. These interviews have been published to the site periodically over the past few years.
One off our favorite interviews is with the Beastieboys.com webmaster, a dude named Minton. Though the interview (as well as the fan site) predates the Beastie Boys current website by several years, Minton himself is still involved with the New York rap group and tours with them. The Q&A is funny and revealing. Minton must have felt like the luckiest webmaster in the world when he got that gig.
Anyway, props to Beastiemania.com. Check it out.
RELATED LINKS
Beastie Boys' Who's Who [Beastiemania.com]
Beastiemania - Unofficial Fan Site
Posted by Robsam at February 8, 2005 11:36 PM
