The Standard Coincidence and The Problem With Band Names
June 05, 2004 | 
10 Comments
Life can be funny at times, and no, in case you were wondering, this isn’t a post about Web standards. Ok, maybe a tad.
Anyone who has been following the discussion about my Designing The Band project will have heard the band name “The Standard” thrown around a few times. It’s a good name and I thought about using it for a bit.
It was quickly pointed out that it’s the name of a real band, one I’d never heard of. Until last night.
I went out to see Mclusky (who rocked — sing it!) and Oceansize (who kicked ass) not knowing that the opening band was a little band from Oregon called, you guessed it — The Standard!
They were pretty darn good, so like any good Web geek would do, I went looking for their Web site. Took me quite awhile to find anything about them. Why? Because “The Standard” doesn’t lend itself to searching.
I see this as a pretty big problem for bands on the Web. Especially smaller bands. A year ago a search for “The Postal Service” got you exactly that — a bunch of links to the US Postal Service. Now that they’ve been around awhile they show up pretty high, I assume because people link to them, but for those just starting out, or not big enough to get people to link to them, this could be a big problem.
So, what to do? You don’t want to eliminate the possibility of a common name like “The Standard” for a band. I mean, it’s a great name. No, I think the answer lies in better titles. As it usually does when talking about optimizing findability in search engines.
I think bands who have this problem need to get a bit creative with their titles. Advice that is pretty much opposite to what you’re “supposed” to do. Simply adding the word “band” or “music” to the title would help. Maybe adding the title of the band’s latest album would be a good idea.
For example, The Standard could have something like: “The Standard : Wire Post To Wire : A Band From Oregon” or something. That would have helped me considerably. Simply having a title of “THE STANDARD” doesn’t cut it, obviously.
In any case, they’re a pretty good band and have a somewhat interesting sound. They go from mellow to rockin’ and they sound somewhere in the middle of Cat Stevens and Joy Division.
They opened up what was a pretty damn good show. Oceansize was great, I’d never heard them before last night. Kinda like a really loud, hardcore version of Incubus is what they sounded like. And, of course, Mclusky was killer.
All in all a great night last night — got to love those funny little coincidences life throws your way. It’s just too bad when they throw into sharp relief one of the things that frustrates me most about the Web.
The fact that I can’t ever find anything! ;)
Filed under: Life and Such
Comments
1. Jason Marble said:
Crazy coincidence. It’s funny when things like that happen. I just checked out their website and listened to the two songs they have posted. They for sure have an interesting sound. I think they’re pretty good. I wish I could see them live though.
TheStandardSite.com, that’s pretty funny. It’s gonna be a little harder to be found on the web with a domain name or title that isn’t very unique. Like you said Keith, creativity is the key.
Posted on June 5, 2004 01:36 PM | #
2. Craig C. said:
I admit I hadn’t performed any due diligence when I first mentioned “The Standards” as a potential band name (or the singular version either), but a few minutes with Google proves fruitless. Searching allmusic.com turns up the aforementioned Oregon rock band, as well as a gospel group and a doo-wop group from the 50s.
It’s a good band name, so it’s not exactly surprising to find it in use.
I’ve had similar issues when searching for info about X and All. Back in the Napster days I could only find tracks for those two bands by searching for individual song titles and then viewing the entire library of whoever had them in hopes of finding more.
Posted on June 5, 2004 08:43 PM | #
3. Craig C. said:
After a bit of experimental Googling:
Searching for “X” gets stock quotes for a steel company, x.org about the Linux window manager, a page about X-Files season 8 on DVD, and apple.com’s page on OSX. Narrowing the search with “X band” gets a bunch of info about radar. Searching for “X band site” finally turns up the band’s official site as the #3 result, interestingly enough ranked after a page mentioning Fugazi (another of my favorite bands).
Googling for “All” gets stock quotes for Allstate, a link to AllTheWeb, the aforementioned All Music Guide, and numerous other sites not even remotely connected to the former Descendents. “All band” and “All band site” are equally fruitless searches. In fact, All is proving much harder to Google than X. Yet searching for “Descendents” gets a results page chock full of relevant links, including the official All site in the #2 spot.
Next experiment: “The The”
This could take a while…
Posted on June 5, 2004 09:03 PM | #
4. sTEVEN sTREIGHT said:
I like your comment on creative band names.
I used to ponder band names endlessly. I was in a few punk-electronic bands, and did a lot of solo industrial electronic noise music, etc.
How does a band know if there’s already a band with the name they want to use? Before the Internet it was a real problem, but now it still is. I mean, where do you go? Register a band name? What?
Here are some names I used in the past, being as surreal and unexpected as possible, to avoid overlap with other bands, names so stupid, nobody in their right mind would want to use them:
The Yellow Microscopes
The Coffee Birds
Training Bra
The Oil Parades
The Invisible Ink Tattoos
The Worried Warts
The Meta-4
Sex Destruction
Cops Without Donuts
Large Scale Swine Operations (LSSO)
Ten Dollars Worth of Musical Equipment (literally true, too)
It’s Our World Now
Sleepwalkers Who Found Their Car Keys
The Guru Zombies of North America
…and many more.
In some cases in the past, I’d change the name of the band with each new release.
Posted on June 6, 2004 12:38 AM | #
5. Jason Santa Maria said:
I agree with you Keith. From all of the bands I have been in, the hardest part was always the name. If only the internet was in full swing back then! I became fascinated with band names. That was half the reason I started my band names page, because I noticed I only ever thought of names when I didn’t need one. Granted, most of those are just puns and ones that make me smile. If you ask someone to come up with a weird name, half the time they throw the word “monkey” in it. But we have the same damn trouble naming most anything (try and think of a good company/website name).
I had a brain fart when I said the Standard was from Philly. I knew it was a band name already, but I got them mixed up with the Philly band, The Situation. My brain is packed with too many old TV theme songs.
Posted on June 6, 2004 04:58 AM | #
6. Allen said:
“Jazz Standards”. It’s a catagory of the Jazz genre and not a (potential) name of a band, but it’s a slight twist to what you’re mentioning. Plus, the title “Jazz Standards Band: Jazzing up webstandards” sounds cool
(or is it just me?).
Posted on June 7, 2004 03:26 AM | #
7. Spoilt Victorian Child said:
God, I love McLusky.
And, yeah, this is definitely a problem for new bands. Pity the poor saps in Get F*cked.
Posted on June 7, 2004 04:11 AM | #
8. jeff said:
There’s always “The Electric Shoes”, the name of Kevin Arnold’s band in “The Wonder Years” (remember that show?)…
Posted on June 7, 2004 07:35 AM | #
9. cscott said:
How about “The Standard Coincidence?”
Posted on June 7, 2004 05:06 PM | #
10. Lee Hickman said:
I always thought my friends got there band name sorted for web searching. Check out this band name!
Posted on June 10, 2004 08:09 AM | #
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